#Now I can either go back in to achievement-hunt / start a new campaign / go back to Hollow Knight and keep trying to beat the Radiance ...

[ghostprinceiii]

I finished the game :)

[prof-peach]

If you could cross over two of your favorite games, which would you choose? Please explain, why that crossover would be a good match.

Oh you’re going to regret asking this one, I’m bout to GET SERIOUS.

So Pokemon, obvs, I love the whole world it’s built in, but the games imo are REALLY boring, I haven’t enjoyed one a lot since gale of darkness, the main ones just are a little too linear obvious plots, pretty standard setups for story and style. Speaking of style, the games lack personality, the models aren’t animated well, moves have no dynamic energy or visual difference at times, and the turn based battle style just feels kind of, I don’t know, old? Slow? Just doesn’t suit what I enjoy personally, gives me a FInal Fantasy vibe and I just cannot stand the speed at which things happen in those games, plus not into 3rd person ‘let’s build a team of people’ much, but that’s a problem for another time. With this all in mind, the game I wish would happen is like gen20 Pokemon, far future sadly, I doubt I’d see it in my lifetime but god I’d be happy if I did!

Ok so take the newest Zelda graphics, the visual treat that was BOTW, open world, puzzles, not JUST combat, you got side missions, hunt the chickens, find missing pets, parcels, items, whatever. Love it! The horse taming?! Amazing you funky little game. Now take the bad guys and beasts from that. And put Pokemon in instead. Give them the diversity, the life and believable natures that BOTW gave the animals, I followed a frog in BOTW for 15 minutes, and it was a great experience, it felt like it was believable. Above world spawning, ACTUAL difficult gameplay, rare spawn rates, make dragons hard to get again, cmon, it’s too easy now, make it so we need a certain set of Pokemon for certain tasks. Water types big enough to carry you will be able to get you to new areas, rock types that can help you climb mountains faster, or break through blocking boulders. Actual towns with more than 4 houses in them, shops, barns, farms, homes. Like little link with the heat, maybe ice types would struggle in volcano areas, or bug Pokemon not be so comfortable in gale force winds. Give the weather more of an effect on your partners. Mounts, don’t even get me started that Pokemon Let’s go had you able to ride any of the larger species, but swsh did not???? Bitch please, give me my rideable Pokemon. The wild area too was far too closed, limited, online was laggy and a mess, camping is limited, let me do more with my team. Pokemon for me is all about the actual creatures, how they live with humans, and the many wonderful things they’re capable of. Yes of course it’s cool they can fight, but like what else you know?

I’d love a game that lets me buy a plot of land, maybe plant things, custom build things. I’m a sucker for the fallout4 settlement builds when they’re modded to hell and back, they’re fun! It can be a really calm and creative process. If I could do that and skip the main campaign and all the battles for a bit? Amazing, it sound perfect for me. I am that distracted hoe collecting flowers while the kingdom burns in the background. Side quests are everything to me. Let me give homeless people enough money to get them in a home? Let me adopt Pokemon that are stray around the town? Plz oh plz bring me a Pokemon game that allows me to work WITH my team to do more than KO other species. I want to save and buy a plow for my buddy gogoat, and grow amazing foods to sell to get currency to spend in decorations, to spoil my team. Give me actual game consequence, if I ignore that sick and injured Pokemon I find in the wild, later maybe it’s family don’t want to help me out with a different problem, too stricken from grief. I am all about the average bits, the old women who need help, the lost pets board in town, the general day to day stuff. Let me get cosmetic items for the Pokemon I keep, cute outfits, special gemstone items, let me actually live with them, or even feel remotely like they’re realistic.

Ok so in game, if it’s looking like BOTW it’s pretty beautiful but also stylised, I’d have it so you can send out a maximum of 3 Pokemon from your 6, using bumpers and such to throw them out. If you hit the trigger you switch from controlling the human trainer, to the Pokemon you’ve targeted with a standard lock on targeting system. You then can be the leader, but be the Pokemon. You could technically defeat the game without a human if you wanted, which incorporates the mystery dungeon games I think, and caters to that crowd. I’d love to see the use of attacks out of battle, things like using water gun to grow plants, using ember to start a campfire faster and stave off the cold. There’s no consequence to Pokemon anymore, and I think that’s where it’s lost me. I have to admit I miss the days of a poisoned pokemon fainting if you don’t heal them soon enough, I miss gym battles that were actually tough, damn, try picking charmander in red and beating brock without grinding in viridian forest first, it’s not easy. And I loved that. Yes it’s a child’s game, it will never be difficult again, but god it’d be nice to have a bit of a challenge, or maybe a difficulty setting, so some could play it with hostility turned off, great for kids, or you can be n adult like I know so many Pokemon fans are, and play it on expert mode and ACTUALLY have to work hard to beat the game. Alternate skill trees anyone? Train gun a fire type to ACUTALLy combat water moves?? Please! Cmon! It frustrated me that every challenger has pretty much a systematic set of moves to use to win. Grass opponent? Fire attack spam until you win. It’s dull, so at least with very difficult tricks to either find or learn in game would make it more achievable if you can send that fire type in and I don’t know, train them so much the heat evaporates the water mid-battle and you suddenly have a shot at winning. Pokemon has taught me that if you work hard enough you can achieve something, but the games just have such strict ways to win. Feels wrong.

In terms of battling, let us BE the Pokemon, let us learn to dodge, train our speed, train our defence, make a team of truly tough Pokemon instead of just, average? Some species have a cap on their skills, a squirtle has lower stat points than a Charizard, but you can’t ever change that? Let me choose the Pokemon I believe in, and let me work with them until they’re just as good, if not better than the game tanks. This would also make online battles more interesting. Everyone picks the top trio. Fairy, dragon, legendaries. And yknow what? It’s boring. That one IRL fight with the monster Pacharisu that won in the world tournament with follow me and the situs Berry? Unbelievable, I love that little rat so much because of this, so let us all have a chance to build a team that’s strategically viable, strong, and potentially a winner formula, even if they aren’t fully evolved, or the biggest Pokemon in the world. Yeah maybe you have to grind way harder with your unevolved Pokemon, but you get to the end game and win, because you put love and time into species that you enjoy, not just good fighters.

Unfortunately I am beholdent to Todd-idiot-Howard, and I love the Eldrescrolls and fallout games (before they got dumb, not that I don’t play the new ones. 76 I’m looking at you, you big asshole game.) honestly I hate online games, so none of that junk, just a good old fashioned open world sandbox game is plenty. Games for me are an escape from others, not an invitation to socialise. To each their own of course, and I do play online games sometimes, just pretty short lived ones, over watch and rdr2 for example. Would they be sometimes better on private servers? Yes of course, fallout76? Want to play with others? No. I do not. Please leave me alone. And if you buy a private server you’re feeding the monster that is Todd Howard, the man the myth the asshole, then we’ll get more bad games like 76. I just so desperately want the Pokemon company to see what a beautiful potential game they’ve got on their hands, that could be suitable for far greater audiences, but instead they’ve focused on the kids. It’s fine, it’s functional, but it’s lost to the fans from day 1, that are all 20+ years old now and want something meatier to play, something far more broad and inclusive. I also hate that there’s no wheelchair option in any Pokemon game. Like cmon, it’s not hard to include that.

In short, BOTW + Pokemon, with a sprinkle of open world sandbox to it, less fighting, more fun. Or, at least both options. Sure, go fight everything, great, but I want to farm carrots over here with 6sunflora, plz let me have some peace.

Edit: I forgot about harvest moon, chuck some of that in there too.

SECOND EDIT: someone in the comments mentioned to put this in Unova? Plz love yourselves, this game would be ALL MAPS. Stuff one singular location, this is the ideal game, put every map in it, join them, put islands in, make them more explorable, more detailed!

[imaginaryelle]

Would you do anything with Wei Ying and the 4 main Juniors like either a fic or just how they interact in the show compared to the older generations

(Many thanks to @miyuki4s for the awesome beta work!)

*

It’s a banquet. A banquet Wei Wuxian was not, technically, invited to, but which he is attending nevertheless because no one in charge figured out he wasn’t supposed to be there until he’d already been offered food.

Such kind servants the Yao Sect has. Such a contrast to their sour Sect Leader, who keeps staring into his wine as if it’s turned to vinegar on his lips.

Wei Wuxian decides not to test his welcome too long—yes, he had been rather useful on the night hunt this afternoon, and yes, his role in Jin Guangyao’s downfall and the known fact of the Chief Cultivator’s favor do buy him a certain amount of social standing with the major Sects, but he’s not going to sit in a man’s hall all night mocking him with his very presence.

Well, he might.

Okay, he definitely would, except the wine is merely decent and the conversation is stilted and, frankly, boring. It would be bearable if he was getting to watch Lan Wangji endure it as well, but alas, the Chief Cultivator has pressing business in Yunmeng, apparently, which must be quite pressing indeed for Jiang Cheng to ask for him and which Wei Wuxian is certain would only be made more difficult by his own presence, even if he does still worry about Jiang Cheng, somewhere in a not-so-secret corner of his heart. So instead of making small talk or setting off into the night he takes his wine and bows out of the hall to Sect Leader Yao’s disgruntled nod of acknowledgment and goes in search of better entertainment.

He finds it just around the side of the disciples’ dormitories, behind a stand of magnolia trees.

Lan Jingyi, Ouyang Zizhen and several other vaguely familiar young members of various clans are sitting in what looks to be a small garden, huddled around what is quite probably either illicitly procured food or, more probably, wine. There’s a flash of gold near the center, and Wei Wuxian is able to answer the slightly-nagging question of where his nephew disappeared to halfway through the feast. Fairy, thankfully, is nowhere in sight. He wonders, for just a moment, whether they purposefully left Lan Sizhui’s reasonable voice out of this clearly ill-advised venture before he catches sight of him half-hidden behind Lan Jingyi’s shoulder, a look of fond exasperation on his face.

Wei Wuxian takes a drink of his own wine and prepares to keep walking—there’s probably a rooftop somewhere with a good view of both the garden and the waning moon to keep him entertained without disturbing anyone else’s fun.

“Ah! Wei-qianbei!” It’s one of the ones Wei Wuxian doesn’t quite remember who greets him, which is a little embarrassing, but the boy’s wearing Yao sect robes and looks like he lost a fight with a thorn bush—ah. Young master Liang Fai, who got a little too up close and personal with a malevolent spirit this afternoon. He beckons Wei Wuxian closer, either ignoring or not noticing those of his companions who freeze in place—Lan Jingyi and two other Lans try valiantly to look as if they have not touched alcohol and Lan Sizhui offers up a slightly chagrined smile—or those who are making only mildly obvious efforts to stop him. Jin Ling looks for a moment as if he might bolt through a nearby bush. “Wei-qianbei, can you teach us that talisman you used today? The one that banished the mist.”

A few of the others actually do look interested in that, even Jin Ling, at least until Wei Wuxian shakes his head.

“You can achieve the same effect with a basic spirit-repelling talisman,” he informs them. Blood is stronger than ink, of course, but he remembers their eagerness in Yi City. Best not to mention that. “It’s nothing special.”

“What about your ward-breaker then?” Lan Jingyi asks. Wei Wuxian arches an eyebrow at him.

“Hanguang-jun did a lecture on it,” Lan Sizhui puts in, soft-spoken and reasonable as ever. “On your inventions, like spirit-attraction flags. He said you had a ward-breaker talisman.”

“I might,” Wei Wuxian allows, though it was never really a secret. “How good’s your brushwork?”

The next half hour is a delightful rush of fresh ink, waving paper and bright enthusiasm. Enthusiasm, of course, is key in the creation of this particular talisman. Enthusiasm, focus, and delicate control of a brush. A few of them can produce a handful of sparks in their first tries. Jin Ling and Lan Sizhui each manage one butterfly, to their evident glee and Wei Wuxian’s lavish praise. Ouyang Zizhen manages a quietly smug three, to general acclaim. They finish the wine, and someone steals more, and an hour goes by and the moon rises higher and then Jin Ling, a little flushed but entirely determined, asks:

“Can you tell us about the Sunshot Campaign?”

Everyone goes quiet. Wei Wuxian laughs, too loud in the long shadows. He is burningly aware that Lan Sizhui—Wen Yuan—is sitting somewhere on his left.

“Surely you’ve learned all about that already,” he says. His smile feels stretched too-thin across his face.

“Not really.” Jin Ling frowns. Wei Wuxian can’t decide if the expression makes him look more like Jin Zixuan or Jiang Cheng, but it’s familiar frustration either way. “Jiujiu won’t tell me anything and—” he stops, lips pressing tight together.

“There are a few stories,” Ouyang Zizhen says in a sort of hushed whisper that makes everyone lean in closer. “but it’s strange, they’re always—”

“It’s always the same stories,” Liang Fai says. “No matter who you ask. It’s always about how awful Wen Ruohan and his sons were, and then the Yin Iron, and the razing of Cloud Recesses and Lotus Pier. Then the Sects rise and Lian—and Meng Yao goes undercover, and Chifeng-zun lays siege to Nightless City.”

“My father always says the Wens reached too far,” Ouyang Zizhen adds. “That they were arrogant and thought they held the authority of the Heavens themselves. But when I ask what happened before the war, or why they attacked Cloud Recesses, he just talks in circles. Sometimes I’m not even sure he knows the answer at all.”

“There’s not much detail,” says Lan Jingyi. “Honestly, I’ve gotten more out of merchants and kids playing in the street than most cultivators. There are more stories about you, really. After. When you were at the Burial Mounds.”

Wei Wuxian sighs. Of course there are. Just as now, when there are so many stories of Jin Guangyao, once more Meng Yao to the vindictive and impressionable, and how people always knew he was up to something. Even at the time, when the events were fresh in everyone’s mind, no one had wanted to remember who the Wens were before the war. If they had, Wei Wuxian might not have been the only one standing by the survivors.

He finds Lan Sizhui’s eyes in the dim moonlight, but Lan Sizhui only stares back at him, as calm and composed as if he’s waiting for a lecture in Cloud Recesses. All the young faces around him are intent and watchful. Waiting. Waiting for him to prove, as he has so many times before, that he’s different from their parents. Because he is, just—maybe not as different as they think.

“It was a war,” he says. “There are better things to talk about. Like—oh, the clouds, the clouds are very nice tonight.”

The clouds are nice. For the record. Worthy of poetry even. But of course these are determined young cultivators. They aren’t just going to let this go.

“It’s when most of them earned their titles,” Jin Ling says. Insists. “And they weren’t—you weren’t—that much older than we are. Not really. What’s so bad that we can’t know it?”

Wei Wuxian remembers a sudden flash of sky, of grass scraping at his scalp and cheek as his brother’s hands closed around his neck. He remembers his sister’s hands, raw and swollen from scrubbing and boiling cloth for bandages. The way Lan Wangji had turned away when he’d asked, and your brother? Your uncle? in the Xuanwu cave. The taste of corpse-dirt in the back of his throat.

There are many, many things that no one should ever have to know. And yet … Jin Ling asks so little of him, in the usual way of things. And not every memory is a weakness their elders will resent.

“What do you know about the Yin Iron?” he asks. It’s a safe enough subject—for one thing, he’s something of an expert, and that’s something he made his peace with long ago. For another, it doesn’t reach too deep into the scars lurking under his skin, and he knows that it has to be part of what Jiang Cheng doesn’t talk about: watching his new recruits, cultivators who trusted and believed in him, become mindless foes with the same face. These young cultivators have seen corpse puppets, but they’ve never seen someone turn before their eyes. Someone they knew and fought alongside. Someone they called brother or sister. He can’t imagine Lan Wangji or anyone else from that time talking about it either.

“It can be used to control corpses,” Lan Jingyi says promptly. “To make them stronger. And used too long, the Yin energy can be damaging to the spirit.”

Wei Wuxian snorts. Of course the Lans would teach that second part. He wonders if they also teach of Lan Yi’s sacrifice, these days. He picks up his brush again and sketches an incomplete array—unbalanced and open ended. Energy ever re-directed against its source.

“Have you thought about what control of corpses means, on a battlefield without Yin Iron of your own? Where every fallen ally can become an enemy?”

The sudden stillness around him would indicate that no, they haven’t. More than one looks like his wine is not agreeing with him.

Wei Wuxian picks up another piece of paper and starts a new talisman—fire, to burn away impurities. “There’s a lot I really don’t remember.” He laughs a little and lights the paper with a twist of his fingers. “My memory has always been bad.”

There is quiet as the paper burns to ash and the night breeze sweeps even that away. Wei Wuxian reaches for the wine and pours himself another drink, and that seems to break the moment at least a little. Jin Ling looks particularly disappointed, and Wei Wuxian is debating telling the one or two actually decent stories he has of Jin Zixuan when someone else speaks first.

“But, Wei-qianbei …” Ouyang Zizhen looks around at his friends and Sect brothers, and then back to Wei Wuxian, determination hardening his features. “If we don’t know how it happened, how will we know how to stop it happening again?”

There are nods around the circle, and Wei Wuxian takes another drink to swallow back the tightness rising in his throat. “I’m really not the right person to ask,” he says.  It’s a very noble sentiment they’re nurturing of course, but the world had turned on him much the same way it had on the Wens, and —ahah. He gestures at Lan Jingyi and Lan Sizhui, triumphant.

“Hanguang-jun,” he says. They stare at him.

“Hanguang-jun doesn’t talk about the war either.” Lan Sizhui’s gaze doesn’t waver, trained on Wei Wuxian.

“There are innumerable things our esteemed Chief Cultivator never puts into words,” Wei Wuxian agrees with a languid wave of his hand, “but does that really mean you don’t know what he thinks?”

Lan Sizhui blinks, then smiles at him.

“The seminars,” says Jin Ling. “He’s setting up—I don’t know, really, lectures and trainings and things, in Gusu and Caiyi, inviting people to speak or visit from all over. Jiujiu says he’ll probably be pushing the rest of us to do that too, soon.”

Ouyang Zizhen nods. “The watchtowers were Jin Guangyao’s project after the war, right? My father says Hanguang-jun wants something better than watchtowers. That he’s working on a new talisman, like the Jin Clan’s butterfly messengers.”

Jin Ling frowns, his hands tightening around his sword. “He hasn’t mentioned the butterfly messengers to me.”

“It’s Hanguang-jun. I don’t think he said anything about it to anyone, Father just saw him writing talismans that turn into pigeons after that conference focused on the towers.”

“Sect Leader Yao doesn’t like how he’s treating the smaller sects.” Liang Fai turns his helmet between his hands, his expression thoughtful. “He says the Chief Cultivator will recognize even just two people as a new sect, if they own so much as a single house to train out of. It’s making the bigger sects nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” says Jin Ling, scowling at him. “And neither is the Jiang Sect.”

“Ah, ah!” Wei Wuxian interrupts before tensions can draw any higher and waves his hands in the space between Jin Ling and Liang Fai. “Let’s talk about something else. Right?”

Jin Ling looks away, but the conversation doesn’t change. 

“He’s worried about communication and response time,” says Lan Jingyi. “He’s always said it’s a cultivator’s job to go where the need is.”

“If more people can identify a problem, or know the right techniques, it won’t get out of hand,” Ouyang Zizhen agrees. “And with more sects, there are more cultivators in more places. It makes sense.”

“He travels.” All eyes shift to Lan Sizhui, who looks only at Wei Wuxian. “That’s part of what you mean, isn’t it? When Lianfang-zun was Chief Cultivator, everyone went to Lanling to speak with him. To the home of the Jin Sect. But Hanguang-jun doesn’t accept as many visiting parties. Most of the time, he goes to them.”

Lan Jingyi’s face scrunches up, doubtful. “I thought that was because he didn’t want to host so many banquets.”

“He still has to attend just as many,” Lan Sizhui points out. “Maybe more, even.”

“He’s staying neutral,” Jin Ling says, sudden and with an expression like he’s even surprising himself. “He can’t speak for Gusu Lan. That’s why Grandmaster Qiren is still at every conference. Because he’s Chief Cultivator, but not Sect Leader.”

That seems to be some sort of breaking point—several people start talking at once, and Wei Wuxian slowly eases himself out of the circle; he’s not needed anymore, and he should probably see himself out before Sect Leader Yao feels forced to offer him a place to sleep. Also, he’s out of wine.

Lan Sizhui meets him at the gates.

“Tell him we’re happy to help, with anything.”

Wei Wuxian frowns at him, confused. “Tell who?”

“Hanguang-jun. When you see him.” Lan Sizhui smiles and pets Little Apple’s nose. “Tell him we want to help. Even Jin Ling, though he might grumble about it.”

Wei Wuxian feels a sudden pang of homesickness—for the familiar walls of Lotus Pier, and for Lan Wangji’s steady presence at his side. But traveling to Yunmeng is no better an idea now that it was this afternoon.

“Ah, A-Yuan,” he says, “you can tell him yourself. You’ll probably see him before I do.” 

Lan Sizhui looks doubtful, but he doesn’t argue. He seems to hesitate a moment, and then he sort of lunges into Wei Wuxian’s side and hugs him. 

“What—”

“Thank you,” Lan Sizhui says as Wei Wuxian tries to figure out what to do with his hands. They’ve only done this a few times, still, and he’s not entirely sure what’s allowed when, and he’s desperately anxious to not mess it up.

“For what?” he asks, settling his free hand on Lan Sizhui’s back. 

“For helping us,” Lan Sizhui says, almost at a whisper, and Wei Wuxian is sure they’re not talking about the gaggle of young cultivators in the garden anymore. He tightens the curl of his arm.

“You don’t need to thank me, A-Yuan. I—”

“Ning-shushu told me a little,” Lan Sizhui interrupts him, the words half-muffled in his collar. “And I’ve heard—I know all the same stories as the rest of them. I mean it. Thank you.”

Wei Wuxian shakes his head, but he doesn’t protest aloud again. Instead he wraps his other arm around Lan Sizhui as well, and tucks his chin over Lan Sizhui’s white-clad shoulder. He watches the gauzy clouds drift slowly across the brightness of the moon and makes a silent promise: 

This time, they’ll do better.

[mintgator]

MDZS fic ideas

Things I’d love to see in Mo Doa Zu Shi fanfiction. These are my notes for things I have told myself I am not allowed to write. I’ve read...so many fics for this fandom, like most of the archive, and I’m sad that I’m pretty much at the point of rereading/waiting for updates. These ideas have been swimming around in my head that I have no time to write, so PLEASE someone take them and gimme some new words to read, I beg you.  Of course, end goal should be wangxian in some way, because otherwise WHAT IS THE POINT, but I don’t have time to write these, so...here you go. Please let me know if you use them. I wanna read these, but I don’t have time to write them, so maybe someone else will want to.

*Time Travel AU in which WWX goes back and for some reason tells Madame Yu all the bullshit that’s gonna happen, so they team up and fix all the things. I just...really want Mama Yu to like WWX thanks. And dear god, LET JC BE HAPPY! I need so much more resolution on that front. Even the book did not satisfy me. I WANT MY BOYS TO GET ALONG! And I want Mama Yu to not be awful and abusive to WWX! I mean she had reasons for being salty but uh that is NOT good justification for the shit she pulled with WWX. Also, hell, let Jiang Fengmian get his core melted and have Madame Yu run the sect. WE NEED FEMALE REP.

*Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze live so WWX gets to grow up with his parents. He meets LWJ as a rogue cultivator or something idk. This would make a fun oneshot.

*LWJ’s mother lives! Honestly, I just want happy Lan-fam. Can I get that please? Just how much would it change the dynamic of the story if LWJ’s father led the sect properly and his mother wasn’t locked away in a goddamn building and actually got to spend more time with her kids? I am forever salty that we’ll never know why Mama Lan killed her hubby’s teacher or w/e. Somebody GIVE ME SOME REASONING.

*WWX gets taken in and claimed as heir by Wen Ruohan...and WWX doesn’t learn that their ways are wrong until he’s at least a teen (perhaps when sent to train at the Cloud Recesses?) and realizes how the other Sects really feel about them. Give him some convoluted morals that he has to unlearn. Make Wen Xu and Wen Chao hate him for being chosen over them. Change Wei Wuxian/Wei Ying into Wen Ying/Wen Wuxian and have it be a secret that he’s not actually a Wen. Have WWX actually not want the Wen Sect destroyed because despite how messed up its people are, not all of them are bad--mostly just those in power (it still baffles me that the other clans just DESTROYED an entire sect, like I know the Wens burned Lotus Pier but DAMN that’s cold!) Even some kind of variation where WWX influences Wen Ruohan and his children’s evil mindset would be really interesting. Otherwise, can you imagine WWX with Chenqing on the Wen side? Ouch. Also, this sticks WWX with Wen Ning and Wen Qing early on and I LOVE THEM, so there’s that.

*WWX doesn’t come back after his first death, and LWJ achieves immortality because he’s stubbornly still looking/waiting for WWX. Two centuries pass (we’re going to ignore any technological advancements and replace them with cultivation advancements or something) and LWJ ends up befriending a nice lady cultivator who falls for him, and even though he only considers her a friend, he agrees to marry her. They have 1 very stubborn gay daughter (only from consummation sex which brings up a boatload of other problems) who somehow stumbles across a reborn!WWX with all his memories--daughter is hella bitter that her father clearly does not return her mother’s affections and that he is apparently pining for someone who is so long dead that people don’t actually remember his name (ie - people remember Yiling Laozu but not that his name was Wei Wuxian). But without knowing who he is, the daughter ends up liking WWX until she finds out the truth about who he is and drama ensues. Can you tell I’ve wanted to write this one so badly? I mean I could just about draft an outline, but I HAVE TO FOCUS ON MY ORIGINAL NOVEL I’M SORRY.

*Time Travel AU in which Yanli alone gets a do-over with all the future knowledge and fixes everything just by being her amazing self. I feel like she’d be a really keen manipulator.

*The story from NHS’s pov. I wanna read all his manipulations and him putting them into place. Is there anything like this out there? Because oh my GOD I wanna know what’s going through his head sometimes. I really, really do!

*Jiang Cheng/Wen Ning - AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO THINKS THIS WOULD BE AN ENTERTAINING SHIP? Just...I sort of tolerate the JC/LXC and JC/NHS pairings because they’re commonly used, but honestly, I’m not crazy about either one. However, WN is such a sweetheart and JC is such a hothead and there is so much opportunity for drama there. Also, in some cases depending on timeline...WN is, yunno, a corpse--a fixable thing if you weave in WWX’s involvement and make him and JC get along again. GIVE ME THAT. Like I don’t read much other than wangxian focused fic, but I would read the hell out of this (also you could easily balance those two pairings).

*Somewhere in the waiting gap, LWJ is given three tasks by a deity of some sort who promises to bring WWX back if he completes him...but these tasks have to UTTERLY go against LWJ’s character and completely destroy his reputation as Hanguang Jun. Honestly, this could go cracky or painfully dark.

*No idea how, but Mo Xuanyu manages to bring WWX back fully in-tact and they both get to live. WWX of course takes MXY under his wing, and together they avoid the notice of even LWJ for a lot longer than WWX did in canon. I would love to see them figuring out the whole JGY plot in the background and LWJ tailing them around just a little too late to the party each time a major event goes down until finding out in some kind of dramatic finale that WWX has been back for a while. I have yet to see characterization for MXY that I really like. Most people make him either ridiculously whiny or so much like WWX that they may as well be the same character. :/ So, uh, maybe a different approach? I mean MXY is allowed some complaints, he’s had a rough time of things, but come ON.

*Lan Wanji never finds Wen Yuan and poor widdle Shizui manages to survive into adolescence living on his own in the burial mounds...accompanied by the fragmented ghost of his Xian-gege who very slowly is pieced back together by A-Yuan, who has sort of naturally started using demonic cultivation and somehow develops a heroic reputation as a rogue cultivator. Why? Because he’s Shizui, and Shizui is SO PURE OK? Maybe he has a fascination with LWJ, even though his memories of Rich Gege are kind of fuzzy. Shizui matchmakes his two ridiculous dads. Oh and inquiry doesn’t work on WWX cuz his soul is shrouded by the resentful energy in the burial mounds.

*The Wen clan burns the Cloud Recesses to the ground around the same time WWX has lost his parents, but LWJ somehow escapes. Reportedly, everyone in GusuLan is now dead, but he somehow ends up in the same town as WWX. They meet and bond immediately. Maybe LWJ saves WWX from the dogs. Anyway, JFM never finds WWX, so he and LWJ grow up together in poverty, eventually teaching themselves cultivation and night hunting, until their fame grows so much that they catch the attention of the Wen clan (or something). Have them ridiculously dedicated to each other, already in love and thinking of themselves as cultivation partners. I want their bond to straight-up shock people. LET THEM BE SHAMELESS. LWJ would have to have a fake name and wear something other than white.

*LWJ and WWX figure out their relationship stuff a lot sooner and end up building a proper sect in the burial mounds. I want LWJ wearing WWX’s colors. I want demonic cultivation to work hand-in-hand with regular cultivation. I want them to find artifacts or books or something in the burial mounds indicating a civilization used to be there that also studied demonic cultivation, or maybe they actually find some long forgotten god/dess of demonic cultivation who empowers them in exchange for worship.

*LWJ was not whipped for protecting WWX, he was imprisoned for life, not in GusuLan, but in some godforsaken prison that is so intense no one in the clans really likes to talk about it. I want him flung into some hellprison with ghosts and demons, where only his cultivation keeps him alive (and relatively sane) for that decade-ish gap until WWX’s fragmented ghost somehow finds him. Of course, WWX realizes LWJ loves him, which triggers in WWX a want to finally come back to life. He finds a way back to the living world and rains hell upon the people who decided it was a good idea to imprison LWJ until someone finally tells him how to get to the prison. He frees LWJ and helps him recover while all the JGY stuff is going on the background. Wangxian returns to the cultivation world in time to stop that catastrophe. (Before LWJ is imprisoned, he makes LXC promise to take care of A-Yuan of course!)

*WWX gets flung into the burial mounds and embraces demonic cultivation, but realizes he has somehow bound himself to the awful place and can’t leave. Over time, he lures stragglers and refugees to the mounds, where he welcomes them to stay and live safely. Outside, the Sunshot Campaign is a failure and what remains of the sects bow in subservience to the Wen clan. Inflicted with some permanent disabilities from the war and left to run GusuLan now that his brother and uncle are dead (sorry Xichen), Lan Wanji never gets the chance to go looking for WWX. Thirteen years pass and WWX has absorbed so much resentful energy from the burial mounds that he is practically a part of it. Finally, he is able to leave, but the world he finds is much different from the one he remembers, and his health fades fast when he is outside of the mounds. Somehow, WWX figures out that demonic cultivation doesn’t damage the body/soul/temperament if somehow counterbalanced properly with a golden core--and since he doesn’t have one, he and LWJ do a soulbond thing so that their cores (WWX: demonic and LWJ: golden) balance each other. Then he can take on the Wens.

I could literally whip out ideas nonstop, but these are the big ones that have been just...beating on the walls of skull trying to get out. Of course, they don’t always account for everything, so more thought is needed. Anyway, if you write any of these, please let me know so I can read them, and of course a shoutout would be nice. c: My username on ao3 is the same as here. Enjoy~!

[cuthian]

Starting Over Chapter Eight

Alright, this is it!

The next one... the next one is the one everyone's been waiting for, babies. Working on that now, and hopefully will have that done ASAP.

Thanks for sticking with me, lovelies.

Love, Annaelle (& Juulna, who is indispensable and without whom I could never do this).

Chapter Eight

AMERICAN SUPPORT FOR GAY RIGHTS MAY LEAVE AFRICANS VULNERABLE!

By Norimitsu Onishi

LAGOS, Nigeria — Suspicious neighbors and landlords pry into their private lives. Blackmailers hunt for victims on the social media sites they use to meet others of the same sex. Police officers routinely stop them to search for incriminating images and chats on their cellphones.

Since an anti-gay law went into effect last year, many gay Nigerians say they have been subjected to new levels of harassment, even violence. They blame the law, the authorities, and broad social intolerance for their troubles. But they also blame an unwavering supporter whose commitment to their cause has been unquestioned and conspicuous across Africa: the United States government.

“The U.S. support is making matters worse,” said Mike, 24, a university student studying biology in Minna, a town in central Nigeria, who asked that his full name not be used for his safety. “There’s more resistance now. It’s triggered people’s defense mechanisms.”

[…]Four years ago, the American government embarked on an ambitious campaign to expand civil rights for gay people overseas by marshalling its diplomats, directing its foreign aid, and deploying President Obama to speak before hostile audiences[...]Since 2012, the American government has put more than 700 million dollars into supporting gay rights groups and causes globally. More than half of that money has focused on sub-Saharan Africa — just one indication of this continent’s importance to the new policy.

America’s money and public diplomacy have opened conversations and opportunities in societies where the subject was taboo just a few years ago. But they have also made gay men and lesbians more visible — and more vulnerable.[…]other African nations weighing in on the situation for LGBT+ communities in Nigeria. King T’Chaka of Wakanda, a traditionally more reclusive nation, has expressed his intention to set up an outreach center for the at-risk population of Nigeria.

“Love has been considered simply love for centuries in Wakanda,” King T’Chaka said in a press conference, where he announced that his son, Prince T’Challa, would oversee the initial preparations for the center. “If we can help others achieve such calm and such peace in their lives, it is our duty to ensure it will be so. While we appreciate the support of the American government, the time has come for African nations to support each other”—Continued on Page 49

—Norimitsu Onishi, ‘American support for gay rights may leave Africans vulnerable’, The New York Times, 2 December 2015

——————————

Personal floor Of Steve Rogers, Becca Barnes and Thor, Avengers Tower, Manhattan, New York, U.S.A.

December 3rd, 2015 – 8:04 AM

Pepper

Pepper barely blinked when Steve opened the door with his hair askew, clad in sweatpants and a t-shirt that had clearly seen better days, with thick bags under his eyes.

“You look like shit,” she told him bluntly, because while she liked him well enough, she was a little grumpy about the fact he’d insisted she come down to his floor so early in the morning. She’d spent far too long throwing up this morning to pretend to be civil, and she was certain Steve would understand.

“Yeah,” Steve sighed, opening the door wide so she could come in. “I know.”

She pushed past him and walked into the apartment, stopping only for a moment to raise an eyebrow at the state of it. She’d never known Steve to be exceptionally tidy, but he was certainly not a messy person either—it was, therefore, a big surprise to see the otherwise neat room looking quite chaotic.

There were pillows and blankets strewn across the couches and floor, along with what looked like enough empty snack wrappers to feed a small army—or one supersoldier, she supposed.

“Had some fun?” she asked bemusedly, turning to look at said supersoldier with a raised eyebrow.

Steve sighed and shook his head. “Becca came home last night,” he began, pushing past Pepper to pick up some of the blankets. “She was… well, upset, to say the least.”

Pepper frowned and turned towards the bedrooms, where she assumed Becca was. “What happened?” she demanded, glancing towards Steve concernedly. “Is Thor with her?” Thor and Becca weren’t meant to return to Earth for a few weeks yet, and to hear that Becca had returned, apparently horribly upset, was more than just a little concerning.

“No,” Steve shook his head. “I mean, I think he came with her to bring her back and to make sure she was alright, but she told me she didn’t want him to stay, so he left.”

Pepper spun around. “Why would she—”

Steve raised a hand and shook his head before she could complete the question. “Look, I’ve already told you more than I intended to. Becca—Becca should tell you the rest herself. I—” He sighed. “I don’t think I’m qualified to help her in this.”

Pepper pouted, but conceded the point. If it was indeed something personal, then Becca did deserve the chance to tell her herself.

“Is she in her room?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

Steve nodded wordlessly, and Pepper sighed before moving towards the bedrooms. Becca’s room was shrouded in darkness still, but she could make out Becca’s still form on the bed, hardly more than a lump of blankets.

“Is she asleep?” she whispered to Steve, who had followed her into the hallway and was leaning back against the wall behind her, looking for all the world like he was about to fall asleep where he stood.

“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Maybe? She was earlier, but she basically cried herself to sleep, so I don’t—I don’t know if she’s still asleep.”

He rubbed a hand through his hair, and Pepper was abruptly struck by how extremely tired he looked.

“Go to bed, Steve,” she told him sternly. “I’ll talk to her. We’ll be fine.”

The fact that he didn’t argue with her, only nodded tiredly before sulking off down the hallway to his own room, only reassured her that he was actually exhausted. She turned towards Becca’s room again, biting her lower lip as she tried to figure out what would’ve had the other woman so upset she’d spent the entire night crying in Steve’s arms rather than her boyfriend’s.

She would’ve assumed it a break-up, if not for the fact that she knew Becca and Thor’s relationship was about as rock solid as any relationship could be. Not only that, but if their relationship had been rockier than they’d shared with anyone else, Pepper was reasonably sure Thor would never have put so much effort into organizing the trip to Asgard.

No, the problem likely lay solely at Thor’s father’s feet.

From what she’d heard, the man had opposed the relationship for almost as long as Becca and Thor had been together, and he didn’t shy away from playing dirty to get what he wanted. She just… she couldn’t imagine what Odin could’ve said or done to make Becca decide to come home rather than stay with Thor—what he could’ve said or done to make Becca insist that Thor leave her alone.

She uncrossed her arms from over her chest and walked into Becca’s room, crawling onto the large bed with the younger woman and wriggling lightly until her head rested on the pillow next to Becca’s.

She remained quiet for a bit longer, listening to Becca’s breathing for a few minutes before she said, “I know you’re awake, Gummy Bear,” she said quietly, smiling a little when Becca huffed in annoyance before she rolled over to face Pepper.

“Hi,” Becca croaked. “Steve call you?”

Pepper nodded. “He’s worried. What’s going on, sweetheart?” She reached out and tucked a stray lock of hair behind Becca’s ear, fingers lingering on the younger woman’s cheek before she dropped her hand to the bed. “You know you can tell me anything.”

Becca’s eyes were suspiciously shiny, and her lower lip trembled. “I don’t—I don’t know how to say it.”

“Are you and Thor—” Pepper suggested carefully, but Becca interrupted her before she even finished speaking.

“No!”

Becca blinked, and Pepper thought they were both a little startled by the harsh denial.

“We’re fine,” she continued shakily. “It’s just…” She shook her head again and rolled onto her back, pushing her hand into her messy hair. Pepper kept her eyes on Becca as the other woman tried to collect her thoughts, trying to discern anything that would give her more of a clue as to what could have happened to freak her out this bad.

Becca heaved a sigh and rolled her head to face Pepper again. “I’m pregnant.”

Pepper blinked. “Oh.”

She looked away for a second, abruptly recalling Thor’s casual certainty that the pregnancy he sensed wasn’t Becca’s—clearly, he’d been mistaken there. “How did Thor take it?” she asked carefully, because she wouldn’t ever disrespect Becca by asking if the baby was Thor’s at all.

Becca scoffed quietly. “I think he’s ecstatic. Not that he’s told me that—he’s…” she exhaled roughly, voice thick with tears. “He’s trying so hard not to pressure me, but I—” she broke off and shook her head. “I can’t make this kind of decision on my own.”

She turned towards Pepper again, tears running down her cheeks, and choked, “I don’t want to do this on my own.”

“Oh, Gummy Bear,” Pepper breathed, opening her arms readily to catch Becca when she pitched forward, bursting into tears again. She rubbed her hand across Becca’s back as she sobbed, and immediately understood why Steve had looked so entirely exhausted.

She felt instantly horrible for thinking it, and held Becca a little tighter.

“Maybe you should tell him that,” she suggested softly, running her fingers through Becca’s hair like she’d been doing since Becca was an insecure teenager with a desperate need for a female role model in her life. “He might be a god, but he can’t read your mind, Becs. Maybe he’s scared too.”

“He wants kids,” Becca whispered, not lifting her head from Pepper’s shoulder. “I know he wants them, he’s told me that he does—it just… I didn’t think I… that we would ever…” She sniffed. “After Iraq, I put it out of my mind. No use in wanting what I couldn’t have. And then with Thor, I—it didn’t matter anyway, because we couldn’t. And now I…” she shrugged helplessly. “Now I don’t know what I want.”

Pepper swallowed thickly.

She hadn’t known the full extent of the consequences to Becca’s capture and torture, but she’d known some were long-lasting. She wondered if Tony and Rhodey had known—she supposed Rhodey must’ve known, given he had been with Becca for most of her recovery overseas, and Tony had barely left her side once she’d been returned to the States—and then decided it didn’t matter if they’d known.

All that mattered was that Becca was clearly having trouble processing the pregnancy.

“How about,” Pepper suggested slowly, thoughtfully, “you and I take a few days away. I know this spa that’s perfectly safe for pregnant people—designed for us, really. We can get massages, relax, and you can take the time to think things through, without having the pressure of everyone being there to ask you about it all the time. You can talk to me, or your grandmother, or your therapist, but you don’t have to.”

Becca was quiet for a beat.

“Okay,” she said quietly. “And then I need to talk to Thor. It’s not just my life.”

Pepper sighed. “No, it isn’t.”

“I just,” Becca croaked. “I love him. I don’t want this to break us.”

Pepper tightened her arms around Becca but didn’t say anything. Offering her a meaningless platitude wouldn’t help—she couldn’t promise that this wouldn’t break Becca and Thor. Things like these were deal breakers in relationships for a lot of people, and Pepper couldn’t say if it would be one for Thor and Becca too.

She didn’t think Becca knew if it was one either.

“You’ll figure it out, Gummy Bear,” she said softly. “You’re not alone in this. We got you.”

——————————

BREAKING: “IRON MAN AND CAPTAIN AMERICA ARRESTED BY NYPD OFFICERS FOR DESTRUCTION OF CITY PROPERTY AND RESISTING ARREST.”

4December 2015 — Cities are, of course, as we all know, hard places. Filled with concrete, asphalt, wood and steel surfaces, urban centers manifest their edge physically as well as metaphorically. Much of what makes cities seem unfriendly is not happenstance; they are intentionally engineered to keep us moving. The trick to urban design that creates discomfort, known as “hostile architecture”, is that its tools are hidden in plain sight.

[…]more aggressive forms of such “hostile architecture” have been popping up in recent years, to greater protest of city residents. […]problems with architectures of control is that they don’t discriminate. An uncomfortable bench is as uncomfortable for a homeless person as it is for a tired passerby or for someone looking for a place to read. Moreover […] doesn’t address the underlying problem of homelessness.

They simply shift it from one area to another, or worst still, reduce its visibility.

There have been many widespread campaigns insisting on the removal of such blatant “hostile architecture”, such as spikes and uncomfortable seating areas, if there are any at all. Many celebrities have put their names behind such campaigns, but none have been so blatant about their support as Tony Stark, also known as Iron Man, and Steve Rogers, better known as Captain America.

[…]both men were captured on camera as they destroyed several of such spikes and broke off an uncomfortably placed seat divide, constantly insincerely apologizing to the police officers who arrived at the scene shortly after, refusing to move until they had finished thoroughly destroying every spike and every trace of such “hostile architecture”.

[…]NYPD put out a statement saying that they indeed arrested two men in relation to the incident and charged them with property damage, but would release no names with the statement.  

[…]James Rhodes was seen exiting the 1st Precinct mere hours after the arrest was made, pinching the bridge of his nose, while Rogers and Stark high-fived behind him. There has been no official commentary from the Avengers Press Team, nor Stark Industries representatives.

—John Michael Kilbane, ‘Iron Man and Captain America Arrested for Destruction of Public Property’, Topic Online Magazine, 4 December 2015

——————————

Tony Stark’s lab, Stark Industries R&D Floor, Avengers Tower, Manhattan, New York, U.S.A.

December 4th, 2015 – 7:31 PM

Steve

“Uh,” Steve said, swinging his legs idly as he scrolled on his phone, frowning at the small screen in confusion. “Tony. Why is someone called Farhan Zaidi emailing me about meeting with him and a guy called Andrew Friedman at my earliest convenience?”

He was perched on one of the workbenches in Tony’s lab, where they had wisely retreated before Pepper got her hands on them—she was decidedly unhappy about the PR nightmare they’d created when they’d accidentally broken some exceptionally hostile benches and seating areas—listening to Tony’s chatter about something involving his Harley that he should probably be more concerned about.

Last time he’d given Tony free reign to tinker on his bike, he’d ended up with something that could’ve easily doubled as a rocket.

Tony looked up, hair wild and spiked in several gravity-defying directions, a smear of oil or grease on his cheek and grinned. “Because you’re the new owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Rogers. Gotta meet with your general manager and your president of baseball operations to talk shop. Financial projections, your yearly contribution to its funds, stuff like that.”

“What?”

Something a lot like panic burned hot in his chest, and he looked up at Tony abruptly. “Tony,” he choked. “I don’t know anything about running a baseball team! Or financial projections! I didn’t even finish high school, and I was terrible at math. I made Bucky do my homework.”

Tony looked up, likely disturbed by the abject panic in his voice, and his expression immediately softened into something more sympathetic. “Hey,” he said, getting to his feet as he wiped his hands on the nearest rag—which Steve suspected was an old band t-shirt. “Don’t worry about shit like that; I was kidding. We got other people to do that kind of stuff, alright? They probably want to meet their new celebrity owner, that’s all.”

Steve swallowed thickly and nodded shakily.

“Think of the children, Steven,” Tony said seriously, although he was barely hiding his smirk, and Steve snorted a laugh despite himself.

There weren’t a lot of things that set him off like this anymore, and most of them were triggers he hadn’t even known he had himself, so he was grateful to all of the other Avengers—and mostly Tony, who had surprised him by patiently showing him coping methods to get through the sudden panic—for not judging him when one came up so suddenly.

“Fine,” he chuckled. “Alright.”

Tony grinned when Steve relaxed, reaching out to poke him in the shoulder with the wrench he was still holding. “Also, I’m totally calling bullshit on you being bad at math—I’ve seen you calculate angles in a split second! You wield that physics defying shield of yours using the power of math, don’t deny it!”

Steve smiled and shook his head. “It’s not math,” he denied. “I mean—I just… I look, and then I know where to throw it and how to hit the wall to make it rebound.”

Tony snorted derisively. “It’s math, Rogers, don’t pretend.”

Steve chuckled and put his phone down, leaning back on his hands. “Sure, Tony.”

Tony just shook his head and retreated to the Harley, and the both of them fell silent for a few minutes before Tony piped up again. “So. You made your boyfriend do your homework. Tell me more, Steven. How did you convince him to do that? Were you able to make a compelling argument?” He waggled his eyebrows and Steve couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculous expression he made.

“I didn’t have to convince him,” Steve chuckled. “He was a fucking nerd, he loved doing our homework. You realize we’re talking about the same guy that took me on a date to a science fair for fun.” He rolled his eyes at Tony and shook his head. “Get your mind out of the gutter, Stark.”

“No can do, mon capitaine,” Tony crowed. “It is my favorite summer home.”

“I’ll be sure to inform Pepper of that,” Steve deadpanned, reaching for the sketchbook and charcoal pencils Tony still denied he bought specifically for Steve, settling in to sketch Tony as he bent over Steve’s Harley again, trying to lose himself in the familiar scratch of the pencil on paper, relishing in the way it helped the buzzing in his head quiet down a little.

He wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that, Tony tinkering and Steve sketching, but when he looked up again, Tony had moved on to digging a screwdriver into one of his Iron Man gauntlets, frowning at the flickering blue light of the repulsor node as though it had personally betrayed him.

He had several completed sketches of Tony in various poses, and his hand stilled when he realized he’d somehow slipped into a sketch of Howard, bent over a workbench that held several rifles with Bucky by his side, an excited grin on his lips. Steve smiled when he recalled that day—he had been tied up in meetings for most of their stay on base, and Bucky had decided to bug Howard about upgrades to his rifle. Steve had found them six hours later, arguing heatedly about the best guns and the necessary upgrades to Bucky’s slightly alarming and continually growing weapons arsenal.

It’d been a good day.

“That my old man?”

Tony’s voice startled Steve from his reverie, and he looked up to find the man standing right in front of him, looking at the sketch with an entirely unreadable expression.

He nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Talking guns with Bucky. Constantly trying to make upgrades.”

Tony snorted humorlessly, tossing the rag he’d been wiping his hands on aside carelessly. “Yeah. Figuring out how to make deadly weapons more efficient. Sounds like him alright.”

Steve winced.

He knew that Tony’s relationship with his father had been strained and that Howard had not been the best of fathers to his genius son, but it was difficult, still, to reconcile the memory of the joyous, enthusiastic man he’d known—annoying and arrogant as he may have been, at times—with the cold and callous father Tony described.

“Sorry,” Tony said gruffly, and Steve looked up, surprised.

Tony rolled his eyes at him and sighed. “I’m not entirely without self-awareness, Cap. The man I knew and the man you knew were clearly different people. The war… I think the war must’ve broken him. Must’ve hardened something in him—made him obsessive, angry…” Tony shrugged helplessly. “And he hated me because I wasn’t you.”

Steve looked away and shifted uncomfortably. He’d known that Howard was fond of him and Bucky, had liked hanging around with them, talking like he was part of the Howlies, like he was one of them, even though he was never a part of the fighting, even though he only supplied the weapons and stayed far from the blood-soaked, grueling reality of war.

“I don’t think he really knew me,” Steve said quietly. “I don’t think he saw me, really.”

Tony sighed. “That makes two of us.”

They were both silent for a moment before Tony heaved another, heavier, sigh and plopped down on one of his favored wheelie chairs, rubbing his hands through his hair, making it stick up even worse than it had been already. “Was he gay?” Tony blurted abruptly, and he looked about as surprised by his own question as Steve was.

Nonetheless, once it was out there, Tony seemed determined to continue.

“Do you think?” he added, shifting restlessly on his rolling chair. “I mean, I’m sure you might not know at all, but do you think he might’ve been—do you think that’s why he was so… so obsessed with you?”

Steve blinked, entirely caught off guard by the questions—by the implication—and shook his head.

“I thought,” he hesitated, “I thought he was in love with Peggy. I was surprised to hear he married someone else, when I woke up. That he had loved someone else enough to marry her.” Steve shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know, Tony. I don’t think he was gay, though.”

Tony shrugged. “I don’t know if there was a lot of love between my parents. To be honest, I always kind of figured they got married because she was pregnant with me.”

Steve bit his lip. “I’m sorry that he turned out the way he did,” he offered.

Tony shrugged. “I’m glad you weren’t like he described you,” he finally said, refusing to meet Steve’s eye. “I kind of don’t hate your ass, Rogers.”

“Awe,” Steve crooned at Tony, because he could tell Tony was uncomfortable talking about this, and Steve was nothing if not a bit of an asshole. “I love your ass too, Tony.” He tossed the sketchbook aside and leapt off the table, reaching out towards Tony as if to hug him, relishing in the way Tony shrieked when he realized what Steve was doing, slapping at his hands ineffectively.

“No!” Tony shouted, stumbling off his chair as if it was on fire, skidding around a table to get away from Steve. “Stay there, Rogers! You’ve not unlocked this level of friendship yet.”

Steve smirked before he pouted at Tony playfully. “Awe, Tony. Lemme love on ya a bit, yeah?”

“Nope,” Tony yelled as he fled the lab with Steve on his heels, making obnoxious kissing noises.

——————————

Personal floor Of Steve Rogers, Becca Barnes and Thor, Avengers Tower, Manhattan, New York, U.S.A.

December 9th, 2015 – 3:01 PM

Becca

As soon as the door clicked shut behind her, she exhaled, resting her back against its flat surface for a moment to gather her bearings. The spa Pepper had taken her to for the week had, despite her own expectations, helped to settle her increasingly frantic thoughts, and having Pepper to talk to had helped her sort through her thoughts and feelings about the… about the baby and what it meant for her future—with or without Thor.

She’d even talked it through with Steve a little.

She exhaled shakily and dropped her bag to the floor before crossing the room to collapse on her bed.

“Hey, Heimdall,” she said slowly, feeling a little stupid for essentially talking to thin air, but she figured it was the most surefire way to make sure Thor would get the message. He’d told her, once, that if she needed him when he was on Asgard, she just had to call for Heimdall and he would send for him.

She hoped that was still true.

“Could you—could you tell Thor I want to see him? Please?”

Predictably, there was no answer.

Becca heaved another sigh and kicked off her sneakers before wiggling up the bed until her head was comfortably situated on a pillow. She stared up at the ceiling for a long moment, hands folded together on her stomach, trying to prepare for what she needed to say to Thor when he got there.

She’d… not practiced, per se, more like... gone over what she needed to say with Pepper and Steve, but the prospect of actually having to have a serious discussion with Thor about their future for the first time in their entire relationship was scary. It wasn’t that they’d never had serious discussions, or that they avoided talking about the future entirely, just that…

Just that it was complicated.

It wasn’t just about what they wanted—their relationship had bigger ramifications than just for them. Thor was the crown prince of Asgard, and while Asgard wasn’t a human nation, she imagined their ideas about succession and heirs worked just about the same as they did on Earth.

If they kept the baby… They’d have to find out what that would mean for Asgard, for Thor, for the line of succession, and they’d have to find out how they wanted their relationship to progress from this point forward. She would have to decide if she could live with… with knowing that if she stayed with Thor, she’d be giving him a commitment for the rest of her life, knowing he couldn’t promise her the same kind of commitment.

She hadn’t… she hadn’t really let herself think about it.

She wanted Thor to be happy, of course, and if they did stay together, if Thor outlived her… she wouldn’t want him to have to mourn her forever, but…

It just felt unequal.

It felt unfair to both of them that, even if he’d want to, Thor wouldn’t be able to spend the rest of his life with her. She didn’t want it to feel like as much of a big deal as it did, because it wasn’t like this was new, or that she hadn’t known about this from the start, but here she was.

Her hand drifted down without any conscious thought, and she swallowed thickly when her fingers pressed against the slightly more sensitive skin on her lower belly. “I hope you know,” she said aloud, although she felt a little silly for talking to what was essentially a clump of cells at this point, “that whatever happens, your dad is going to adore you. And I… I will too, I think, for as long as I’m here. I just hope you won’t think too badly of me when I mess up.”

“I imagine if our child is anything like you, it could never think poorly of you, Krúttið mitt.”

She sat up abruptly and stared at Thor, who stood in the doorway, hair windblown and messy, dressed in the loose black trousers that he wore to sleep, and a long, red overcoat. He offered her a small, uncertain smile, but made no move to come closer without her say-so.

She swallowed thickly. “Hi,” she offered lamely.

Thor smiled indulgently—though nervously—and replied, “Hi, Becca.”  

“I missed you,” Becca blurted, cheeks heating a little as the words fell from her lips—that was not what she’d been meaning to say. She wasn’t sure what she had been trying to say, but it wasn’t that.

True as it might be.

Thor, however, took it in stride and moved into the room, closing the door behind him.

He didn’t move to sit on the bed—their bed—and made to sit in the armchair instead, but Becca suddenly couldn’t stand the distance between them anymore. “No,” she told him abruptly. “No, please, if… you don’t have to if you don’t want to, but—can you please sit with me?”

Thor remained still for a moment, halfway between the bed and the armchair, eyes searching hers for… something, before he nodded. “Of course, Krúttið mitt.”

Becca watched, feeling far more nervous about being so close to Thor than she ever had before, as he approached the bed and crawled over to sit beside her. She exhaled shakily and leaned in, pressing their shoulders together—a simple touch that dispelled more of the tension between them than she’d expected it would.

“Have you—” Thor began carefully, “—have you been able to give our… our child some thought?”

She caught the way his hand twitched, and the way his eyes strayed towards her still-flat belly, and swallowed thickly. It took her a moment to decide to move, to decide that she needed to be able to look him straight in the eye while she said what she needed to say—

She sat up again and turned towards Thor, crossing her legs beneath her.

Thor mirrored her position without complaint and reached out to take her hands in his.

Becca swallowed and looked down at their hands for a moment before she said, “I need you to tell me what you want. I know you’ve been keeping your thoughts on… on us, on the baby, on what you really want to yourself because you didn’t want to pressure me with it, and I really appreciate that, but I need to know what you want now.” She swallowed against the tears that burned in her eyes and squeezed Thor’s fingers before she continued, “I can’t make this decision on my own, and I don’t want to either. Whatever we decide to do will have consequences for more than just us, and I think… I think we need to discuss them, at least.”

Thor nodded seriously. “I’ve not said anything to… to avoid putting more pressure on you.”

Becca smiled tightly and squeezed his hands again. “And I appreciate that. I needed the time to process this, and I have, but… I don’t think we can make a decision about this, about the future without talking about the consequences.”

“That is fair,” Thor nodded. “And I… I suppose you’re right. I hadn’t properly considered the consequences yet, but you are right in saying that we should.” He smiled at her and added, “I sense that you have questions—that there are things you need to know.” He squeezed his fingers around hers and swept his thumb across her knuckles. “Ask me what you want to know, elskan min.”

Becca nodded and looked down, thinking. “Would you name our baby your heir? Could you even do that if we’re not married? Do we need to get married—do you even want that? Was that what that dance meant, at the feast? And I mean… How would that even work, with our lifespans? And for that matter…Will the baby have your lifespan or mine?”

Thor blinked, and Becca felt momentarily bad for the barrage of questions she’d unleashed on him, before he chuckled and shook his head. “Never one to do things by halves, are you, Krúttið mitt?”

She smiled sheepishly, and Thor chuckled again before his forehead creased into a frown. “I would name our child my heir,” he said decisively. “There are no definitive laws that state that I cannot, or that I must be married to the mother of said child, although…” He hesitated and looked up at her, “I would not be opposed. I did not think I would ever consider marriage after Loki, but… The intention was what I signified to the people when I danced inn matki munr with you, and I would greatly enjoy making the suggestion a reality—ifyou wanted that too.”

Becca stared at him.

“Oh,” she choked.

She… she wasn’t sure what she’d expected him to say, but it hadn’t been that. She’d been very careful not to think of their relationship as anything more than temporary because she knew how he felt about marriage after losing Loki, and because it seemed like such an impossibility for an Aesir god to want to marry a simple human.

She huffed.

This was like finding out about the baby all over again.

Maybe she should revisit her coping mechanism of not thinking about things she couldn’t have anyway—it’d blown up in her face twice now.

“Are you sure? she asked quietly. “You could marry an Aesir—someone like Sif. She’s beautiful, and I’m sure she loves you, even if you don’t think so. And I don’t think your father would try so hard to separate you as he does with us. He probably wouldn’t have you sleep in different wings of the palace, and he’d definitely acknowledge her as more than your ‘guest’.”

She snorted and shook her head.

“He’d probably rejoice. He was going to betroth you to her before Loki came along. It’d be so much easier...” she trailed off and looked away from him, her stomach tying itself in uncomfortable knots at the thought of Thor being with Sif instead.

She nearly jumped when Thor’s fingers suddenly touched her cheek lightly, tilting her chin up so she’d look at him. “Perhaps it would be easier,” Thor said frankly, softly. “But it would not be real, Rebecca. Not real like what you and I have managed to build together. I’ve told you before, Krúttið mitt, and I’ll say it again as often as you like: I’m yours. However long you want me for, I’m yours.”

She swallowed thickly, blinking back tears as she looked at him. “What if that’s for the rest of my life?” she whispered, pulling his hand—the hand that was still curled around hers—to her belly, resting it just above where their baby was growing.

Thor rubbed his thumb over her cheek tenderly and smiled. “Then we will work hard to ensure we have the happiest life imaginable. Together.”

A tear ran down her cheek, and she smiled weakly. “…and if I want you for the rest of your life?”

Thor’s smile never wavered, even as he leaned in and pressed a feather light kiss to her lips. “Then I will find a way to give you that,” he whispered against her lips, resting their foreheads together.

Becca sobbed again, dryly and tiredly, and slung her arms around Thor, hugging him close and allowing him to manhandle her until they were stretched out on the bed together, pressed together from head to toe.

“Thor?” she said quietly, leaning back a little so she could look at him without going cross-eyed. Thor moved back a little too, reaching out to tuck her hair behind her ear, and Becca loved him. “I think I want to keep the baby,” she told him quietly.

Thor smiled, leaning in to kiss her briefly. “Me too,” he said when he leaned back. “Me too.”

——————————

Residence of Samuel Wilson, Washington D.C., U.S.A.

December 12th, 2015 – 9:34 AM

Steve

“So are we ever going to talk about it?”

Steve looked up from where he was drowning his pancakes in syrup and blinked at Sam, who was seated across from him at the kitchen island, both of them still dressed in their running gear. They’d gone running early that morning, despite Steve’s late arrival back in D.C. for the weekend the previous night, and Steve had thoroughly enjoyed running literal laps around Sam to annoy the other man.

He’d missed their easy comradery and Sam’s good-natured teasing, and it felt good to be away from New York for a bit. He loved it still—it was his city, after all, the city he’d died to save—and he enjoyed living in the Tower well enough, because he liked being so close to all of the others, but it got suffocating sometimes too.

Sam’s offer for him to stay the weekend had come at the perfect time—now that Becca and Thor had decided on their future, it was like they’d reverted back to the early stages of their relationship, where they were utterly unable to keep their hands off of each other.

Steve was a little tired of walking in on them everywhere.

Things had been a lot less tense at Sam’s place.

Up until now, of course.

“Talk about what?” he asked, innocently blinking at Sam, because he did have some idea of what it was that Sam meant, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to address it already. Their… their thing was mostly unspoken and Steve had let it be that way because he really did like Sam a lot, and he found him very attractive, but… but he still couldn’t really imagine actually actively being with him.

With anyone.

Sam gave him a flat look, and Steve relented, putting down the syrup and leaning his forearms on the kitchen island. “Sam,” he sighed, looking up at the other man from beneath his lashes. “Do we have to do this now?”

“We have to at some point,” Sam said reasonably. “I’d rather not keep avoiding it until we start resenting each other.” He shrugged. “We gotta talk about what we want this,” he gestured between them, “to be.”

Steve sighed. It wasn’t like they were constantly teetering on the edge of being friends and being more, but there had been plenty of moments where they’d passed firmly into the gray area between friendship and… more. Steve knew they needed to acknowledge those moments, that they couldn’t ignore them indefinitely, but… God, it was just easier to let things happen.

It’d worked well enough for Thor and Becca—who said it couldn’t for him and Sam?

He caught Sam’s eye and sighed again.

“Yeah,” he admitted, “yeah, okay. Look, it’s…” He rubbed his hands across his face and groaned. “I’ve spent the last few days watching my best friend agonize about whether her future would include the man she loved, or if they were just doomed for failure, if it’d be easier on them both if they gave up now—and she picked him. They chose each other, and God, I want that.” He looked up at Sam with watery eyes and smiled weakly. “I want that, Sam. I miss that. And I want more than anything to love someone like that again, but I don’t…” he shook his head. “I don’t think I can, and I don’t think I will any time soon either.”

He was a little surprised by his own expressiveness, but he had been thinking about it for a while, despite his reluctance to actually talk about it out loud.

Sam reached out and patted his hand comfortingly. “Look,” he said slowly, “I never expected you to be able to shrug off the loss of a fifteen-year relationship as intense as yours just like that, man.” He shrugged. “Lord knows it took me forever, and Riley and I had only been together a few years. Maybe our timing’s just… off.”

“Yeah,” Steve nodded. “Maybe.”

They were both silent for a bit before Steve continued, “So… I know we said just friends before, but… I really can’t handle more than a friend right now, so can we—can we just go to being friends for real this time? Is—is that okay?”

“Yeah, Steve,” Sam smiled, looking a little relieved, and a little sad. “That’s okay.” He grinned cheekily and added, “That does mean you should probably sleep on the couch tonight though.” Steve snorted a laugh and tossed a strawberry at Sam, who just ducked it and threw one of his own back.

They didn’t usually share the bed, but they’d both been exhausted by the time Steve made it to D.C., and Sam hadn’t made up the couch for him yet.  

Steve hadn’t minded the intimacy of it.

He’d been sharing beds with people for as long as he could remember; with his ma and Bucky, and later with the Howlies too, on colder nights during the war—it wasn’t something exclusive to his relationship with Bucky, and it didn’t trigger him so much as other things did.

Steve knew that Sam wouldn’t mind sharing the bed even now, whether they were friends or more, but he could see how it would be awkward tonight. As relaxed and easy and uncomplicated as it had been yesterday, he imagined that being semi-rejected by one’s semi-love interest was something Sam probably needed to wrap his head around.

He could probably do with the privacy.

Still.

Steve was a little shit at heart, and so he couldn’t just roll over and take it. “I’ll wrestle ya for the bed,” he told Sam cheekily, dodging another strawberry neatly.

Sam pointed his fork at Steve menacingly. “I will beat your skinny white ass.”

Steve gaped at him. “I’m a supersoldier,” he exclaimed. “I can literally punch through a wall. I punched a tank once.” He winced at the memory—not because he had actually managed to hurt himself, but because Bucky had been furious with him and had spent over an hour yelling at him after shooting every Nazi in his way in the face.

Sam chuckled. “Irrelevant. I know your weak spot.”

Steve narrowed his eyes at him, because he was fairly certain no one alive knew about the ticklish spot just above the back of his left knee, but it seemed like an awful big risk to take nonetheless.

“You win this round,” he told Sam reluctantly, and pointed his fork at the other man in a way that might’ve been menacing if there hadn’t been a piece of syrup-soaked pancake speared on its tines. “But watch your back, Wilson.”

Sam just chuckled.

—————————

Undisclosed Hydra Base, New York City, New York, United States of America

December 12

th

, 2015 – 3:32 PM Alexander Pierce

He watched detachedly as the technicians went through the procedure of thawing the Soldier, catching the man as he fell out of the tube and dragging the limp man across the room and securing him into the chair. Thick metal bands were secured around his wrists and ankles, and Pierce raised an eyebrow when the men went a step further and secured a similar kind of metal harness around the Soldier’s torso.

“A necessary precaution,” one of the doctors told him when he saw his expression. “It’s usually disoriented and violent when brought out of cryo—more so, according to records, when it’s due for new calibration.”

“Very well,” Pierce nodded. “How long will it take to get it operational again?”

The doctor shrugged. “Anywhere between ten and fourteen sessions.” He gestured to the notes he held and added, “According to Zola’s notes from the last time the Asset had to be recalibrated entirely, it took them seventeen months to rebreak him and then recondition him.”

Pierce ground his teeth. “Very well,” he hissed. “Get on with it then.” He turned on his heel, stalking out of the room, the door falling shut behind him just as the doctor began, “Желани—"

To Be Continued in “Dancing in the Rain”.

—————————

Start from the beginning:

In Hell We Stand By You:

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8)

Never Feel Alone:

(1) (2)

Decisions: (1)

Dancing with a Limp:

(1) (2)

Chances:

(1)

Starting Over:

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

Or read it HERE on AO3 :D Find the sequel HERE on Tumblr :)

[destructiveurges]

“We Are All Going To Die” by Black Oak Clique (USA)

An open letter and anti-manifesto to Climate Offensive, Extinction Rebellion, Earth Strike, and other nonviolent movements

When the world ends, people come out of their apartments and meet their neighbors for the first time; they share food, stories, companionship. No one has to go to work or the laundromat; nobody remembers to check the mirror or scale or email account before leaving the house. Graffiti artists surge into the streets; strangers embrace, sobbing and laughing. Every moment possesses an immediacy formerly spread out across months. Burdens fall away, people confess secrets and grant forgiveness, the stars come out over New York City...and nine months later, a new generation is born.

(CrimethInc.)

We’re going to die?

"The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses." But us – me, you, even those who are killing the earth? We’re going to die.

In the worst case scenario, you drown, you starve, or you succumb to heat stroke. Not figuratively. You will drown, you will starve, you will succumb to heat stroke. Perhaps there’s the small chance that you will survive the mass migration to the last reaches of habitable land in and around the poles.

Perhaps.

But let’s be realistic here: In all likelihood, you’re going to die. A slow, horrible, excruciating death at that. We would like to say this is the future we’re hurtling towards at an ever-increasing rate. But it isn’t: it’s the present, the material, graspable present. Islands are sinking into the ocean. The poverty-stricken are freezing to death on the streets. People are burning to death in gigantic wildfires. The collapse is not to be a single event. It’s a process, and it’s currently underway. In the best case scenario, death is liberation. Perhaps the real “you” – your body, your consciousness, your soul, what have you – won’t die, per se: instead, the abstract “you” – your way of life, your social relationships under capitalism, your system of meaning that’s been drilled into your head since day one – will die.

Can’t we reform the system?

No. We can’t. The system is the problem, and the system runs deep. The problem isn’t just capitalism. It’s also the state, but it also isn’t just the state. It’s the ideology of consumption itself: that beings – plants, animals (including humans deemed to be subhuman), fungi, even inanimate natural “resources” – are objects to be bought, sold, and eventually, consumed. This ideology is perhaps the deepest ideology we have. It permeates every form of knowledge: from science, to art, to politics. It seeps through our language (one must think how often we refer to feeling, living beings – ones with the capacity to suffer – as “it.”) It permeates our relationships. It is the very basis of our societies, if it cannot be deemed our “society” itself – the group of capital-h Humans deemed to be worthy enough to be circumscribed by the abstract Community, that constructs itself in opposition to literally everything else.

Your favorite pet politician isn’t immune to this. Not Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, not Bernie Sanders, not Jill Stein. Not the Democratic Socialists, not the Green Party, not the CPUSA, and not anyone else, either. Perhaps their hearts are in the right place – but sadly, that isn’t enough. To quote the amazing piece Anarchy Works by Peter Gelderloos:

Some people oppose capitalism on environmental grounds, but think some sort of state is necessary to prevent ecocide. But the state is itself a tool for the exploitation of nature. Socialist states such as the Soviet Union and People’s Republic of China have been among the most ecocidal regimes imaginable. That these two societies never escaped the dynamics of capitalism is itself a feature of the state structure — it necessitates hierarchical, exploitative economic relationships of control and command, and once you start playing that game nothing beats capitalism.

What about nonviolence?

Concerning nonviolence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.

(Malcolm X)

The struggle against ecocide was never nonviolent, and it never will be, because it cannot be. That’s because ecocide is violence: violence against me and you, against animals (wild and domestic,) against the trees and the grass and the water and the mountains. Climate insurrection is self-defense. Strict adherence to nonviolence – that is, the rejection of violence – is complicity in the face of ecological destruction. It is not “offensive,” it is not “rebellion,” and it’s not a “strike” at climate change. Many of us do not have the privilege of being nonviolent – namely, those of us who already marginalized. We will be the first to go. We’re the rural farm workers and their families being sprayed with pesticides. We’re the houseless freezing to death in polar vortices. We’re the indigenous peoples whose homes are being swallowed by the sea. We’re the poor who will not have the capital necessary to complete the long trek north to the last remaining habitable lands. If we aren’t violent – if we don’t rebel against the system that oppresses us – we will be crushed. Don’t be complicit in our death, in your death.

What’s climate insurrection?

Perhaps the only hope me or you have. It’s destroying that which destroys us - by any means possible.

Wouldn’t that hurt the movement?

No. A better question would be: what has “nonviolent�� protest won us in the long run? The answer: absolutely nothing. Many supposedly “nonviolent” movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement, were incredibly violent. There were hundreds of riots throughout the United States, and of course, the existence of armed paramilitary groups such as the Black Panthers, or the Brown Berets. One could make the argument that this narrative of nonviolence is pushed by the very people whose power would be threatened by violence, because violence means (perhaps immediate) change. Hence: why those in the US celebrate Martin Luther King Day, a federally recognized holiday; but not Malcolm X Day. Even the most-oft example of nonviolent resistance, the Indian independence movement, was not so. Bhagat Singh, who after his execution became a folk hero of the cause, was inspired by French anarchist Auguste Vaillant to bomb the British Raj’s Central Legislative Assembly. Less than a year before, he had assassinated a British police officer in retaliation for the death of the nationalist leader Lala Lajpat Rai.

Wouldn’t it be counterproductive?

Counterproductive to what? Getting meaningless reforms passed? Getting empty pyrrhic victories in the legal circuit? Performing impotent marches through major cities that don’t achieve anything other than receiving lukewarm press from second-rate newspapers? Ask the battery hen liberated from cramped cages by animal activists, or the old-growth forest protected indefinitely by logging saboteurs (and all the animals who call those forest home): is direct action productive?

Anarchist action— patient, hidden, tenacious, involving individuals, eating away at institutions like a worm eats away at fruit, as termites undermine majestic trees — such action does not lend itself to the theatrical effects of those who wish to draw attention to themselves.

To quote the great illusionist Georges Méliès, "I must say, to my great regret, the cheapest tricks have the greatest impact."

If insurrection is so great, how come people aren’t doing it now?

They are. You just haven’t heard of it because the media is smart enough to hide it. Hearing about the heroic stories of those who fight back would be too dangerous for most to hear – it runs the risk of radicalizing them. Movements like the Animal and Earth Liberation Fronts, have been waging war against ecocide since the 1970s.

I don’t want to go to prison.

We dream of a world without prisons.

I’m scared.

We’re scared too, friend. We should be, but we should be

strong, too

What can we do?

We’ll let the great animal activist Keith Mann speak for us.

Labs raided, locks glued, products spiked, depots ransacked, windows smashed, construction halted, mink set free, fences torn down, cabs burnt out, officesin flames, car tires slashed, cages emptied, phone lines severed, slogans daubed, muck spread, damage done, electrics cut, site flooded, hunt dogs stolen, fur coats slashed, buildings destroyed, foxes freed, kennels attacked, businesses burgled, uproar, anger, outrage, balaclava clad thugs.

What if I don’t have the ability to fight?

You do, even if you can’t physically. Despite the tone of this letter, we aren’t totally opposed to above-ground action. In fact, in some cases, we think it’s necessary. Groups like the Earth Liberation Prisoners Support Group and the Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group are active in representing and advocating for operatives. As Sinn Féin, the Irish political party once associated with the militant IRA has been described:

Both Sinn Féin and the IRA play different but converging roles in the war of national liberation. The Irish Republican Army wages an armed campaign... Sinn Féin maintains the propaganda war and is the public and political voice of the movement.

What happens next?

We don’t know. But with any luck, we’ve laid out our options.

(via Heresy Distro)

[presssorg]

Lies: Border Wall, Unemployment, Trade War, Unemployment, Mueller Russian Investigation, more

AP FACT CHECK: Trump’s untruths on Russia probe, wall, jobs WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is glossing over the facts when it comes to the Russia investigation and his economic performance. The president suggests the 34 charges issued or guilty pleas achieved by special counsel Robert Mueller have had little to do with him. But Trump’s ignoring reality. Most significantly, his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has implicated Trump in a crime by linking him to a hush-money scheme. Cohen also pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his efforts during the 2016 campaign to line up a Trump Tower Moscow project, saying he did so to align with Trump’s “political messaging.”

On the economy, Trump claimed record low unemployment for blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans even as the numbers have risen after the partial government shutdown. And he described the steel industry as “totally revived” despite 20,000 job losses over the past decade. A look at his past week’s claims, also covering global warming and purported progress in building a border wall: RUSSIA INVESTIGATION TRUMP: “Of the 34 people, many of them were bloggers from Moscow or they were people that had nothing to do with me, had nothing to do with what they’re talking about or there were people that got caught telling a fib or telling a lie. I think it’s a terrible thing that’s happened to this country, because this investigation is a witch hunt.” — interview with CBS, broadcast Sunday. THE FACTS: Trump’s correct that Mueller’s team has indicted or gotten guilty pleas from 34 people. He’s wrong to suggest that none had anything to do with him or were simply “bloggers from Moscow.” Among these people are six Trump associates and 25 Russians accused of interfering in the 2016 election. In particular, Cohen definitely was in trouble for what he did for Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty in August to several criminal charges and stated that Trump directed him to arrange payments of hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to fend off damage to Trump’s White House bid. Prosecutors’ court filings in December backed up Cohen’s claims. The Justice Department says the hush money payments were unreported campaign contributions meant to influence the outcome of the election. That assertion makes the payments subject to campaign finance laws, which restrict how much people can donate to a campaign and bar corporations from making direct contributions. It is true that many of Trump’s former associates, including Cohen, were charged with either lying to the FBI or Congress. The 25 Russians charged were not simply “bloggers.” According to Mueller’s indictment last February, 13 Russians and three Russian entities are accused of attempting to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton by running a hidden social media trolling campaign and seeking to mobilize Trump supporters at rallies while posing as American political activists. The indictment says the surreptitious campaign was organized by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm financed by companies controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy businessman with ties to President Vladimir Putin. Mueller’s team also charged 12 Russian military intelligence officers in July with hacking into the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and releasing tens of thousands of private communications. The charges say the Russian defendants, using a persona known as Guccifer 2.0, in August 2016 contacted a person in touch with the Trump campaign to offer help. And they say that on the same day that Trump, in a speech, urged Russia to find Clinton’s missing emails, Russian hackers tried for the first time to break into email accounts used by her personal office. —— TRUMP: “You look at General Flynn where the FBI said he wasn’t lying, but Robert Mueller said he was, and they took a man and destroyed his life.” — interview with CBS. THE FACTS: That’s not what the FBI said. And Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, has agreed that he lied to the FBI, having pleaded guilty to it.

The idea that Flynn didn’t lie to the FBI picked up steam after Republicans on the House intelligence committee issued a report last year. It said ex-FBI director James Comey, in a private briefing, told lawmakers that agents who interviewed Flynn “discerned no physical indications of deception” and saw “nothing that indicated to them that he knew he was lying to them.” But Comey called that description “garble” in a private interview with House lawmakers in December. Comey, in essence, said Flynn was a good liar, having a “natural conversation” with agents, “answered fully their questions, didn’t avoid. That notwithstanding, they concluded he was lying.” At his sentencing hearing in December, Flynn acknowledged to Judge Emmet Sullivan that he knew it was a crime when he lied to the FBI in January 2017. Flynn declined to accept the judge’s offer to withdraw his guilty plea. Neither he nor his lawyers disputed that he had lied to agents. —— UNEMPLOYMENT TRUMP: “You saw the jobs report just came out. …The African-Americans have the best employment numbers in the history of our country. Hispanic Americans have the best employment numbers in the history of our country. Asian-Americans the best in the history of our country.” — CBS interview. THE FACTS: Black unemployment is not currently the lowest ever, possibly in part to the partial government shutdown, which lifted joblessness last month. Black unemployment did reach a low, 5.9 per cent, in May. But that figure is volatile on a monthly basis. That rate has since increased to 6.8 per cent in January. Hispanic and Asian-American joblessness has also risen off record lows last year. Hispanic unemployment last month was 4.9 per cent, up from a low of 4.4 per cent reached in October and December. Asian-American unemployment was at 3.1 per cent, up from 2.2 per cent in May. Moreover, there are multiple signs that the racial wealth gap is now worsening. The most dramatic drop in black unemployment came under President Barack Obama, when it fell from a recession high of 16.8 per cent in March 2010 to 7.8 per cent in January 2017. —— THE WALL TRUMP: “The chant now should be ‘finish the wall’ as opposed to ‘Build the Wall’ because we’re building a lot of wall. I started this six months ago — we really started going to town — because I could see we were going nowhere with the Democrats.” — comments Friday. TRUMP: “Large sections of WALL have already been built with much more either under construction or ready to go. Renovation of existing WALLS is also a very big part of the plan to finally, after many decades, properly Secure Our Border. The Wall is getting done one way or the other!” — tweet Thursday. THE FACTS: Despite all his talk of progress, he’s added no extra miles of barrier to the border to date. Construction is to start this month on a levee wall system in the Rio Grande Valley that will add 14 miles of barrier, the first lengthening in his presidency. That will be paid for as part of $1.4 billion approved by Congress last year. Most work under contracts awarded by the Trump administration has been for replacement of existing barrier. When Trump says large parts of the wall “have already been built,” he’s not acknowledging that previous administrations built those sections. Barriers currently extend for 654 miles (1,052 kilometres), or about one-third of the border. That construction was mostly done from 2006 to 2009. —— STEEL INDUSTRY TRUMP: “Tariffs on the ‘dumping’ of Steel in the United States have totally revived our Steel Industry. New and expanded plants are happening all over the U.S. We have not only saved this important industry, but created many jobs. Also, billions paid to our treasury. A BIG WIN FOR U.S.” — tweet Jan. 28. THE FACTS: He’s exaggerating the recovery of the steel industry, particularly when it comes to jobs. In December, the steel industry employed 141,600 people, the Labor Department says in its latest data. Last March, when Trump said he would impose the tariffs, it was 139,400. That’s a gain of just 2,200 jobs during a period when the overall economy added nearly 2 million jobs. On a percentage basis, steel industry jobs grew 1.6 per cent, barely higher than the 1.3 per cent increase in all jobs. Yet those figures still lag behind where they were before the 2008-2009 recession. When that downturn began, there were nearly 162,000 steelworkers. Some companies have said they will add or expand plants. It’s difficult to know just how many jobs will be added by newly planned mills. But construction spending on factories has yet to take off significantly after having been in decline between 2016 and much of 2018. Construction spending on factories has been flat in the past year, according to the Census Bureau. Trump’s reference to “billions paid to our treasury” concerns money raised from tariffs on foreign steel and other products. Such tariffs are generally paid by U.S. importers, not foreign countries or companies, and the costs are often passed on to consumers. So that money going to the government is mostly coming from Americans. —— VOTER FRAUD TRUMP: “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!” — tweet Jan. 27. THE FACTS: That “iceberg” quickly began to melt as officials found serious problems with a report from the Texas secretary of state’s office on voter fraud. More broadly, Trump is overstating the magnitude of such fraud across the U.S. The Texas report suggested as many as 95,000 non-U.S. citizens may be on the state’s voter rolls and as many as 58,000 may have cast a ballot at least once since 1996. Since it came out, however, state elections officials have been notifying county election chiefs of problems with the findings. Local officials told The Associated Press that they received calls from Texas Secretary of State David Whitley’s office indicating that some citizens had been wrongly included in the original data. So far no one on the lists has been confirmed as a noncitizen voter. Election officials in Texas’ largest county say about 18,000 voters in the Houston area were wrongfully flagged as potentially ineligible to vote and those officials expect more such mistakes to be found on their list. Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump ally, acknowledged problems in the report, saying “many of these individuals may have been naturalized before registering and voting, which makes their conduct perfectly legal.” Early claims by other states of possible illegal voting on a rampant scale haven’t held up. When Florida began searching for noncitizens in 2012, for instance, state officials initially found 180,000 people suspected of being ineligible to vote when comparing databases of registered voters and driver’s licenses. Florida officials later assembled a purge list of more than 2,600 names but that, too, was beset by inaccuracies. Eventually, a revised list of 198 names of possible noncitizens was produced through the use of a federal database. In the U.S. overall, the actual number of fraud cases has been very small, and the type that voter IDs are designed to prevent — voter impersonation at the ballot box — is almost nonexistent. In court cases that have invalidated some ID laws as having discriminatory effects, election officials could barely cite a case in which a person was charged with in-person voting fraud. —— JUDGES TRUMP: “After all that I have done for the Military, our great Veterans, Judges (99), Justices (2) … does anybody really think I won’t build the WALL?” — tweet Jan. 27. THE FACTS: He’s boasting here about his record of getting federal judges and justices on the bench. But that record is not extraordinary. He also misstates the total number of judges who have been confirmed by the Senate — it’s 85, not 99. While Trump did successfully nominate two justices to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, during his first two years in office, four other modern presidents did the same — Democrats Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, and Republican Richard Nixon. Trump, meanwhile, is surpassed in the number of confirmed justices by Warren Harding (four), William Taft (five), Abraham Lincoln (three) and George Washington (six), according to Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and expert on judicial appointments. Trump’s 85 total judicial appointees lag behind five former presidents at comparable points in office. The five are George W. Bush, 99; Clinton, 128; Ronald Reagan, 88; Nixon, 91; and Kennedy, 111, according to Wheeler’s analysis. —— CLIMATE CHANGE TRUMP: “In the beautiful Midwest, wind chill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!” — tweet Jan. 28. THE FACTS: Global warming does not need to make a comeback because it hasn’t gone away. Extreme cold spells in parts of the globe do not signal a retreat. Earth is considerably warmer than it was 30 years ago and especially 100 years ago. The lower 48 states make up only 1.6 per cent of the globe, so what’s happening there at any particular time is not a yardstick of the planet’s climate. Even so, despite the brutal cold in the Midwest and East, five Western states are warmer than normal. “This is simply an extreme weather event and not representative of global scale temperature trends,” said Northern Illinois University climate scientist Victor Gensini. “The exact opposite is happening in Australia,” which has been broiling with triple-digit heat that is setting records. Trump’s own administration released a scientific report last year saying that while human-caused climate change will reduce cold weather deaths “in 49 large cities in the United States, changes in extreme hot and extreme cold temperatures are projected to result in more than 9,000 additional premature deaths per year” by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at recent rates. Trump routinely conflates weather and climate. Weather is like mood, which is fleeting. Climate is like personality, which is long term. —— Associated Press writers Christopher Rugaber, Jill Colvin, Colleen Long and Seth Borenstein in Washington, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report. —— Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd Follow https://twitter.com/APFactCheck EDITOR’S NOTE — A look at the veracity of claims by political figures

Published at Mon, 04 Feb 2019 05:28:50 +0000 Read the full article

[jimmyjohnsmnm]

The 5 Best PPC Companies of 2020

Paid advertising offers a 200% ROI. So for every dollar you spend, you get two dollars in return. It’s no surprise that nearly 80% of marketers consider PPC profitable and beneficial for their businesses. 

But it’s not as easy as throwing ads up, seeing what sticks, and hoping people buy from you. 

There’s a reason PPC agencies exist — managing countless moving parts, and continuous algorithm updates take time. Plus… none of those things are easy to stay on top of, either. 

To make matters worse, choosing the best PPC company for your business presents a new set of challenges. So in this article, I cover my top recommendations, characteristics to look for, and what to expect working with an agency. 

Let’s get started!

The 5 top PPC companies in the world

PPC is an exciting type of digital marketing because you can quickly and directly evaluate your investment return. 

But whether you’re an excellent PPC manager looking to outsource or have no experience running pay per click advertising campaigns, choosing the right PPC agency isn’t always straightforward.

So to help you out, I put together this list of my top recommendations for different types of businesses. 

Let’s dive in!

1. Neil Patel Digital — Best data-driven multi-channel PPC agency

Ads in search engine results aren’t the only type of PPC advertising. 

Other examples include social media, programmatic, and Amazon, each with their own set of quirks and best practices. 

At Neil Patel Digital, we specialize in running multi-channel PPC campaigns using first-party data from our partners. Furthermore, we take this information and use it to create strategic, high-profit campaigns that meet your audience where they are. 

All while helping those in your audience make an informed decision to buy. 

We’ve helped companies like Intuit, GM, and Facebook make more money authentically, using our data-driven approach to digital marketing. 

2. Directive Consulting — Best for B2B, SaaS, and enterprise businesses

If you’re a B2B, SaaS, or enterprise business looking for consulting services or a dedicated PPC management partner, Directive Consulting is an excellent option. 

They specialize in helping software companies around the world run high-ROI campaigns with a dedicated team running and optimizing things behind the scenes. 

Directive Consulting says one of their key differentiators is the predictability of their results. 

They prove it by showcasing numerous case studies outlining their results. In one example, they facilitated a 91.1% increase in lead generation in the first three months on top of decreasing their client’s cost-per-lead by 21.8%. 

So you can rest assured that you’re in good hands.

3. Stryde — Best for B2C and eCommerce businesses

B2C pay per click campaigns are vastly different from B2B campaigns. With different markets and trends, it’s essential to understand your industry’s specific ins and outs. 

And who better to do that than an agency specializing in eCommerce? 

Stryde is an eCommerce-specific digital marketing agency working with small and large companies all over the world. 

While they focus on other aspects of digital marketing like SEO and email marketing, PPC is a huge part of what they do. 

They helped Lime Ricke, a swimwear brand, achieve a 5.2x ROI. Furthermore, they helped  Lucy Ave, a women’s clothing company, obtain a 4.3 ROI. 

With repeatable and impressive results like these (and others outlined in their extensive portfolio), you know you’re making a smart choice.

4. Loud Mouth Media — Best small agency producing big results

If you’re looking for an expert partner in search advertising or paid social, Loud Mouth Media has your back. They’re a small agency based in the UK specializing in PPC (specifically paid search and social) campaigns for businesses of all sizes. 

Loud Mouth Media is partnered with Google, Bing, and Facebook as well. So you know they’re always up-to-date with the latest trends and research across those platforms. 

They’re a small team of 23 expert marketers, creatives, and strategists producing impressive results for companies of all sizes around the world. 

And with numerous digital marketing awards under their belt and past clients like Volvo and BBC, their credentials and portfolio make them stand out as the best small PPC agency producing massive results.

5. KlientBoost — Best for PPC management + landing page design

Strong PPC campaigns go beyond excellent ad copy, design, and targeting. Where you send your targeted traffic matters.  

Which… is why it’s crucial to have well-designed landing pages optimized to convert visitors into leads or customers. At KlientBoost, they understand the importance of conversion-focused landing pages. 

Their in-house team of developers, conversion designers, and top-notch marketers gives them the power to design excellent customer experiences from start to finish. 

They’ve produced repeatable results like:

300% conversion rate increase for Juniper Networks

315% increase in click-through rates for Lemon Stand

97% decrease in cost-per-acquisition for Caresync

So, if you’re looking for a bit of help optimizing your landing pages and a dedicated PPC advertising team to target the right people and turn them into buyers, KlientBoost is for you. 

7 characteristics that make a great PPC company

Now you know my top PPC recommendations based on what you need. 

Let’s move on to what makes these PPC companies the best at what they do. We’ll also walk through what to look for on your hunt for the best option for your business. 

1. Extensive industry knowledge

The best PPC campaigns focus on the right audiences and the right keywords. But not all audience segments or keywords are equal. 

Understanding what works and what doesn’t comes from experience and in-depth industry knowledge. Without the two of those, you’re banking on intuition. 

Which… works sometimes, but that’s not what you should expect from a top PPC agency. 

Take a look at who’s a part of the agency’s team and take some time to evaluate their experience level and expertise in your specific industry. 

You can also look at their published case studies in different industries to see the types of results they produce for their clients. 

If you’re not confident in their knowledge in your industry, move on to an agency that feels like a better fit. 

2. Advanced analytics and reporting

Analytics and reporting are essential aspects of any PPC campaign. 

They help you get a better understanding of what segments and copy work well to shift your budget toward high-profit ads while reducing ad spend on those that don’t work. 

So your PPC agency must provide accurate and transparent reporting, so you always know where every dollar goes and the ROI it produces. 

Furthermore, top PPC agencies aim to collect as much information as possible regarding everything about your campaign. 

This insight helps them to adapt and produce higher ROI campaigns with first-party data directly from your business. 

You may not be able to find out much about this from an agency’s website. So it’s important to ask questions regarding the data and metrics they measure to influence their suggestions and future campaign strategies. 

3. Intent-driven keyword selection

The top PPC marketers know the best way to improve ROIs and reduce wasted ad spend is by focusing on transactional keywords rather than informational keywords for paid search marketing. 

Why? Because people searching for transactional terms are more likely to spend money. 

And good PPC strategists know this is the best way to get your business in front of the right people at the right time without wasting ad spend on irrelevant terms that aren’t going to turn into purchases. 

You may have a hard time learning about this from their website. So be sure to ask questions and gauge their knowledge around intent-based search queries before moving forward. 

4. First-party data sources and strategic partnerships

Search engines and social media platforms are continually updating their algorithms to be as human as possible to provide the best experience for their users. 

So the best PPC companies to partner with are on top of these continuous changes. 

Search and social partnerships provide those deep insights and industry trends non-partners don’t have. 

Furthermore, agencies with a pool of first-party data sources have a first-hand look at your audience’s attributes and behavior to make strategic decisions regarding your campaign before using your ad spend to test the market. 

Look for partnership badges for major search engines and social media platforms on their website. You can also look for an indication of first-party data sources. 

5. Mobile optimization

Fifteen years ago, mobile browsing and searching weren’t around. But today, mobile devices account for more than 50% of all searches made around the world.

But there’s something else a bit more interesting. Mobile devices account for 53% of paid clicks, which means there’s a huge opportunity (and need) to optimize your paid search strategy for mobile.

On top of that, there are nearly 3.5 million mobile social media users across the globe. So the opportunity for mobile-optimized paid social media campaigns is massive as well.

This makes an excellent case for mobile PPC campaigns. And the best PPC companies know this. So make sure the company you choose is prepared to strategize and optimize your campaigns for mobile devices. 

You may have to ask questions if you can’t find this information on their website. 

And if you’re not confident in their mobile capabilities, move on to a different PPC agency. 

6. Local PPC capabilities

90% of shoppers turn to search engines when looking for information on local businesses, and 33% perform these types of searches every day.

Pair that with the fact that 40% of total clicks go to the top three ad spots for transactional keywords, and you have a strong argument for local paid search marketing. 

So if your business operates in specific areas or you have a physical location to sell products or meet with potential customers, local paid search experience and capabilities are must-haves. 

Some PPC agencies specialize in local PPC, but that doesn’t mean those that don’t can’t produce impressive results. 

So be sure to ask questions to ensure you’re a good fit for each other. 

7. Multi-channel PPC services

If you’re looking for a specific type of PPC marketing, this isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker. 

But if you’re interested in cross-channel marketing, it’s easier to run all your campaigns through a single agency. 

And the more you work with them, the more in-tune they become with your business, industry, and specific campaign goals. Plus, you have the benefit of communicating and coordinating with one agency rather than managing several at the same time. 

Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about misaligned messaging from one platform to the next. 

So carefully consider where your target audience hangs out. Don’t forget to consider search engines, social media, paid shopping, and programmatic advertising on sites they frequently visit. 

Then, choose a PPC agency experienced in those areas.

What to expect from a great PPC company

If you’ve never worked with a PPC company before, it’s hard to know what to expect. So now that you know what to look for let’s talk about what working with one of the best PPC companies looks like. 

The details of each phase look different depending on the company you’re working with, but the general approach is typically the same. 

Phase 1: Discovery

The best PPC companies do everything they can to learn everything there is to know about your business and what you’re looking for. So, the first step to any new PPC project is discovery and onboarding. 

During this phase, you and your agency should hash out:

Your budget (including monthly ad spend)

The goals for your PPC campaign

What makes your business different from your competitors

How to improve your landing pages to increase conversions

Specific details about your business and target audience like where they hang out online, when they tend to shop, and where they live

What happens next

This is your chance to share everything you can possibly think of with your PPC agency. Even if it doesn’t feel relevant, it may be crucial to your success. So come into this phase as an open book with an open mind. 

Phase 2: Planning and testing

Once the agency understands your business, target audience, and marketing goals, it’s time to plan your upcoming campaign. This includes defining critical metrics and KPIs as well. 

This phase may also include running a small, low-budget pilot campaign to test different audience segments, copy, and overall execution. 

So, the more information you know about your target audience, the easier this will be. 

By the end of this stage, you’ll have a plan in place for full-scale execution and a deeper understanding of how you’re going to work together moving forward. 

Phase 3: Full-scale execution

Now it’s time to launch the full campaign. The specifics of this depend on the type of advertising and the agency you’re working with. 

Your project could be short-term, long-term, or ongoing. But during this time, you should get regular feedback and thorough reporting outlining everything about your campaign. 

And when your campaign comes to a close, you should have a clear picture of your results. 

Phase 4: Next steps

Lastly, your agency will walk you through the data they collected and explain what everything means. They’ll also probably provide suggestions and feedback on what they can improve if you want to continue working together. 

This stage should also cover what happens next. 

Strategy + creative + the right audience segments = high ROI

Hiring a top PPC company is a smart choice if you’re looking to save time, strategize with experts in your industry, and enjoy short-term results (when compared to something like SEO). 

But choosing a PPC agency you can trust is harder than it sounds. 

So whether you’re looking for advice or someone to take over and manage your campaigns, use these tips and recommendations when making your decision. 

Do you have any experience vetting and hiring a PPC agency? What criteria did you consider when making your decision?

The post The 5 Best PPC Companies of 2020 appeared first on Neil Patel.

Original content source: https://ift.tt/34d2CDi via https://neilpatel.com The post, The 5 Best PPC Companies of 2020, has been shared from https://ift.tt/2E41Z4s via https://ift.tt/2r0Go64

[jjpocketbook]

The 5 Best PPC Companies of 2020

Paid advertising offers a 200% ROI. So for every dollar you spend, you get two dollars in return. It’s no surprise that nearly 80% of marketers consider PPC profitable and beneficial for their businesses. 

But it’s not as easy as throwing ads up, seeing what sticks, and hoping people buy from you. 

There’s a reason PPC agencies exist — managing countless moving parts, and continuous algorithm updates take time. Plus… none of those things are easy to stay on top of, either. 

To make matters worse, choosing the best PPC company for your business presents a new set of challenges. So in this article, I cover my top recommendations, characteristics to look for, and what to expect working with an agency. 

Let’s get started!

The 5 top PPC companies in the world

PPC is an exciting type of digital marketing because you can quickly and directly evaluate your investment return. 

But whether you’re an excellent PPC manager looking to outsource or have no experience running pay per click advertising campaigns, choosing the right PPC agency isn’t always straightforward.

So to help you out, I put together this list of my top recommendations for different types of businesses. 

Let’s dive in!

1. Neil Patel Digital — Best data-driven multi-channel PPC agency

Ads in search engine results aren’t the only type of PPC advertising. 

Other examples include social media, programmatic, and Amazon, each with their own set of quirks and best practices. 

At Neil Patel Digital, we specialize in running multi-channel PPC campaigns using first-party data from our partners. Furthermore, we take this information and use it to create strategic, high-profit campaigns that meet your audience where they are. 

All while helping those in your audience make an informed decision to buy. 

We’ve helped companies like Intuit, GM, and Facebook make more money authentically, using our data-driven approach to digital marketing. 

2. Directive Consulting — Best for B2B, SaaS, and enterprise businesses

If you’re a B2B, SaaS, or enterprise business looking for consulting services or a dedicated PPC management partner, Directive Consulting is an excellent option. 

They specialize in helping software companies around the world run high-ROI campaigns with a dedicated team running and optimizing things behind the scenes. 

Directive Consulting says one of their key differentiators is the predictability of their results. 

They prove it by showcasing numerous case studies outlining their results. In one example, they facilitated a 91.1% increase in lead generation in the first three months on top of decreasing their client’s cost-per-lead by 21.8%. 

So you can rest assured that you’re in good hands.

3. Stryde — Best for B2C and eCommerce businesses

B2C pay per click campaigns are vastly different from B2B campaigns. With different markets and trends, it’s essential to understand your industry’s specific ins and outs. 

And who better to do that than an agency specializing in eCommerce? 

Stryde is an eCommerce-specific digital marketing agency working with small and large companies all over the world. 

While they focus on other aspects of digital marketing like SEO and email marketing, PPC is a huge part of what they do. 

They helped Lime Ricke, a swimwear brand, achieve a 5.2x ROI. Furthermore, they helped  Lucy Ave, a women’s clothing company, obtain a 4.3 ROI. 

With repeatable and impressive results like these (and others outlined in their extensive portfolio), you know you’re making a smart choice.

4. Loud Mouth Media — Best small agency producing big results

If you’re looking for an expert partner in search advertising or paid social, Loud Mouth Media has your back. They’re a small agency based in the UK specializing in PPC (specifically paid search and social) campaigns for businesses of all sizes. 

Loud Mouth Media is partnered with Google, Bing, and Facebook as well. So you know they’re always up-to-date with the latest trends and research across those platforms. 

They’re a small team of 23 expert marketers, creatives, and strategists producing impressive results for companies of all sizes around the world. 

And with numerous digital marketing awards under their belt and past clients like Volvo and BBC, their credentials and portfolio make them stand out as the best small PPC agency producing massive results.

5. KlientBoost — Best for PPC management + landing page design

Strong PPC campaigns go beyond excellent ad copy, design, and targeting. Where you send your targeted traffic matters.  

Which… is why it’s crucial to have well-designed landing pages optimized to convert visitors into leads or customers. At KlientBoost, they understand the importance of conversion-focused landing pages. 

Their in-house team of developers, conversion designers, and top-notch marketers gives them the power to design excellent customer experiences from start to finish. 

They’ve produced repeatable results like:

300% conversion rate increase for Juniper Networks

315% increase in click-through rates for Lemon Stand

97% decrease in cost-per-acquisition for Caresync

So, if you’re looking for a bit of help optimizing your landing pages and a dedicated PPC advertising team to target the right people and turn them into buyers, KlientBoost is for you. 

7 characteristics that make a great PPC company

Now you know my top PPC recommendations based on what you need. 

Let’s move on to what makes these PPC companies the best at what they do. We’ll also walk through what to look for on your hunt for the best option for your business. 

1. Extensive industry knowledge

The best PPC campaigns focus on the right audiences and the right keywords. But not all audience segments or keywords are equal. 

Understanding what works and what doesn’t comes from experience and in-depth industry knowledge. Without the two of those, you’re banking on intuition. 

Which… works sometimes, but that’s not what you should expect from a top PPC agency. 

Take a look at who’s a part of the agency’s team and take some time to evaluate their experience level and expertise in your specific industry. 

You can also look at their published case studies in different industries to see the types of results they produce for their clients. 

If you’re not confident in their knowledge in your industry, move on to an agency that feels like a better fit. 

2. Advanced analytics and reporting

Analytics and reporting are essential aspects of any PPC campaign. 

They help you get a better understanding of what segments and copy work well to shift your budget toward high-profit ads while reducing ad spend on those that don’t work. 

So your PPC agency must provide accurate and transparent reporting, so you always know where every dollar goes and the ROI it produces. 

Furthermore, top PPC agencies aim to collect as much information as possible regarding everything about your campaign. 

This insight helps them to adapt and produce higher ROI campaigns with first-party data directly from your business. 

You may not be able to find out much about this from an agency’s website. So it’s important to ask questions regarding the data and metrics they measure to influence their suggestions and future campaign strategies. 

3. Intent-driven keyword selection

The top PPC marketers know the best way to improve ROIs and reduce wasted ad spend is by focusing on transactional keywords rather than informational keywords for paid search marketing. 

Why? Because people searching for transactional terms are more likely to spend money. 

And good PPC strategists know this is the best way to get your business in front of the right people at the right time without wasting ad spend on irrelevant terms that aren’t going to turn into purchases. 

You may have a hard time learning about this from their website. So be sure to ask questions and gauge their knowledge around intent-based search queries before moving forward. 

4. First-party data sources and strategic partnerships

Search engines and social media platforms are continually updating their algorithms to be as human as possible to provide the best experience for their users. 

So the best PPC companies to partner with are on top of these continuous changes. 

Search and social partnerships provide those deep insights and industry trends non-partners don’t have. 

Furthermore, agencies with a pool of first-party data sources have a first-hand look at your audience’s attributes and behavior to make strategic decisions regarding your campaign before using your ad spend to test the market. 

Look for partnership badges for major search engines and social media platforms on their website. You can also look for an indication of first-party data sources. 

5. Mobile optimization

Fifteen years ago, mobile browsing and searching weren’t around. But today, mobile devices account for more than 50% of all searches made around the world.

But there’s something else a bit more interesting. Mobile devices account for 53% of paid clicks, which means there’s a huge opportunity (and need) to optimize your paid search strategy for mobile.

On top of that, there are nearly 3.5 million mobile social media users across the globe. So the opportunity for mobile-optimized paid social media campaigns is massive as well.

This makes an excellent case for mobile PPC campaigns. And the best PPC companies know this. So make sure the company you choose is prepared to strategize and optimize your campaigns for mobile devices. 

You may have to ask questions if you can’t find this information on their website. 

And if you’re not confident in their mobile capabilities, move on to a different PPC agency. 

6. Local PPC capabilities

90% of shoppers turn to search engines when looking for information on local businesses, and 33% perform these types of searches every day.

Pair that with the fact that 40% of total clicks go to the top three ad spots for transactional keywords, and you have a strong argument for local paid search marketing. 

So if your business operates in specific areas or you have a physical location to sell products or meet with potential customers, local paid search experience and capabilities are must-haves. 

Some PPC agencies specialize in local PPC, but that doesn’t mean those that don’t can’t produce impressive results. 

So be sure to ask questions to ensure you’re a good fit for each other. 

7. Multi-channel PPC services

If you’re looking for a specific type of PPC marketing, this isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker. 

But if you’re interested in cross-channel marketing, it’s easier to run all your campaigns through a single agency. 

And the more you work with them, the more in-tune they become with your business, industry, and specific campaign goals. Plus, you have the benefit of communicating and coordinating with one agency rather than managing several at the same time. 

Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about misaligned messaging from one platform to the next. 

So carefully consider where your target audience hangs out. Don’t forget to consider search engines, social media, paid shopping, and programmatic advertising on sites they frequently visit. 

Then, choose a PPC agency experienced in those areas.

What to expect from a great PPC company

If you’ve never worked with a PPC company before, it’s hard to know what to expect. So now that you know what to look for let’s talk about what working with one of the best PPC companies looks like. 

The details of each phase look different depending on the company you’re working with, but the general approach is typically the same. 

Phase 1: Discovery

The best PPC companies do everything they can to learn everything there is to know about your business and what you’re looking for. So, the first step to any new PPC project is discovery and onboarding. 

During this phase, you and your agency should hash out:

Your budget (including monthly ad spend)

The goals for your PPC campaign

What makes your business different from your competitors

How to improve your landing pages to increase conversions

Specific details about your business and target audience like where they hang out online, when they tend to shop, and where they live

What happens next

This is your chance to share everything you can possibly think of with your PPC agency. Even if it doesn’t feel relevant, it may be crucial to your success. So come into this phase as an open book with an open mind. 

Phase 2: Planning and testing

Once the agency understands your business, target audience, and marketing goals, it’s time to plan your upcoming campaign. This includes defining critical metrics and KPIs as well. 

This phase may also include running a small, low-budget pilot campaign to test different audience segments, copy, and overall execution. 

So, the more information you know about your target audience, the easier this will be. 

By the end of this stage, you’ll have a plan in place for full-scale execution and a deeper understanding of how you’re going to work together moving forward. 

Phase 3: Full-scale execution

Now it’s time to launch the full campaign. The specifics of this depend on the type of advertising and the agency you’re working with. 

Your project could be short-term, long-term, or ongoing. But during this time, you should get regular feedback and thorough reporting outlining everything about your campaign. 

And when your campaign comes to a close, you should have a clear picture of your results. 

Phase 4: Next steps

Lastly, your agency will walk you through the data they collected and explain what everything means. They’ll also probably provide suggestions and feedback on what they can improve if you want to continue working together. 

This stage should also cover what happens next. 

Strategy + creative + the right audience segments = high ROI

Hiring a top PPC company is a smart choice if you’re looking to save time, strategize with experts in your industry, and enjoy short-term results (when compared to something like SEO). 

But choosing a PPC agency you can trust is harder than it sounds. 

So whether you’re looking for advice or someone to take over and manage your campaigns, use these tips and recommendations when making your decision. 

Do you have any experience vetting and hiring a PPC agency? What criteria did you consider when making your decision?

The post The 5 Best PPC Companies of 2020 appeared first on Neil Patel.

Original content source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/ppc-companies/ via https://neilpatel.com

The original post, The 5 Best PPC Companies of 2020, has been shared from https://imtrainingparadise.wordpress.com/2020/08/18/the-5-best-ppc-companies-of-2020/ via https://imtrainingparadise.wordpress.com

[marketingcomcaio]

The 5 Best PPC Companies of 2020

Paid advertising offers a 200% ROI. So for every dollar you spend, you get two dollars in return. It’s no surprise that nearly 80% of marketers consider PPC profitable and beneficial for their businesses. 

But it’s not as easy as throwing ads up, seeing what sticks, and hoping people buy from you. 

There’s a reason PPC agencies exist — managing countless moving parts, and continuous algorithm updates take time. Plus… none of those things are easy to stay on top of, either. 

To make matters worse, choosing the best PPC company for your business presents a new set of challenges. So in this article, I cover my top recommendations, characteristics to look for, and what to expect working with an agency. 

Let’s get started!

The 5 top PPC companies in the world

PPC is an exciting type of digital marketing because you can quickly and directly evaluate your investment return. 

But whether you’re an excellent PPC manager looking to outsource or have no experience running pay per click advertising campaigns, choosing the right PPC agency isn’t always straightforward.

So to help you out, I put together this list of my top recommendations for different types of businesses. 

Let’s dive in!

1. Neil Patel Digital — Best data-driven multi-channel PPC agency

Ads in search engine results aren’t the only type of PPC advertising. 

Other examples include social media, programmatic, and Amazon, each with their own set of quirks and best practices. 

At Neil Patel Digital, we specialize in running multi-channel PPC campaigns using first-party data from our partners. Furthermore, we take this information and use it to create strategic, high-profit campaigns that meet your audience where they are. 

All while helping those in your audience make an informed decision to buy. 

We’ve helped companies like Intuit, GM, and Facebook make more money authentically, using our data-driven approach to digital marketing. 

2. Directive Consulting — Best for B2B, SaaS, and enterprise businesses

If you’re a B2B, SaaS, or enterprise business looking for consulting services or a dedicated PPC management partner, Directive Consulting is an excellent option. 

They specialize in helping software companies around the world run high-ROI campaigns with a dedicated team running and optimizing things behind the scenes. 

Directive Consulting says one of their key differentiators is the predictability of their results. 

They prove it by showcasing numerous case studies outlining their results. In one example, they facilitated a 91.1% increase in lead generation in the first three months on top of decreasing their client’s cost-per-lead by 21.8%. 

So you can rest assured that you’re in good hands.

3. Stryde — Best for B2C and eCommerce businesses

B2C pay per click campaigns are vastly different from B2B campaigns. With different markets and trends, it’s essential to understand your industry’s specific ins and outs. 

And who better to do that than an agency specializing in eCommerce? 

Stryde is an eCommerce-specific digital marketing agency working with small and large companies all over the world. 

While they focus on other aspects of digital marketing like SEO and email marketing, PPC is a huge part of what they do. 

They helped Lime Ricke, a swimwear brand, achieve a 5.2x ROI. Furthermore, they helped  Lucy Ave, a women’s clothing company, obtain a 4.3 ROI. 

With repeatable and impressive results like these (and others outlined in their extensive portfolio), you know you’re making a smart choice.

4. Loud Mouth Media — Best small agency producing big results

If you’re looking for an expert partner in search advertising or paid social, Loud Mouth Media has your back. They’re a small agency based in the UK specializing in PPC (specifically paid search and social) campaigns for businesses of all sizes. 

Loud Mouth Media is partnered with Google, Bing, and Facebook as well. So you know they’re always up-to-date with the latest trends and research across those platforms. 

They’re a small team of 23 expert marketers, creatives, and strategists producing impressive results for companies of all sizes around the world. 

And with numerous digital marketing awards under their belt and past clients like Volvo and BBC, their credentials and portfolio make them stand out as the best small PPC agency producing massive results.

5. KlientBoost — Best for PPC management + landing page design

Strong PPC campaigns go beyond excellent ad copy, design, and targeting. Where you send your targeted traffic matters.  

Which… is why it’s crucial to have well-designed landing pages optimized to convert visitors into leads or customers. At KlientBoost, they understand the importance of conversion-focused landing pages. 

Their in-house team of developers, conversion designers, and top-notch marketers gives them the power to design excellent customer experiences from start to finish. 

They’ve produced repeatable results like:

300% conversion rate increase for Juniper Networks

315% increase in click-through rates for Lemon Stand

97% decrease in cost-per-acquisition for Caresync

So, if you’re looking for a bit of help optimizing your landing pages and a dedicated PPC advertising team to target the right people and turn them into buyers, KlientBoost is for you. 

7 characteristics that make a great PPC company

Now you know my top PPC recommendations based on what you need. 

Let’s move on to what makes these PPC companies the best at what they do. We’ll also walk through what to look for on your hunt for the best option for your business. 

1. Extensive industry knowledge

The best PPC campaigns focus on the right audiences and the right keywords. But not all audience segments or keywords are equal. 

Understanding what works and what doesn’t comes from experience and in-depth industry knowledge. Without the two of those, you’re banking on intuition. 

Which… works sometimes, but that’s not what you should expect from a top PPC agency. 

Take a look at who’s a part of the agency’s team and take some time to evaluate their experience level and expertise in your specific industry. 

You can also look at their published case studies in different industries to see the types of results they produce for their clients. 

If you’re not confident in their knowledge in your industry, move on to an agency that feels like a better fit. 

2. Advanced analytics and reporting

Analytics and reporting are essential aspects of any PPC campaign. 

They help you get a better understanding of what segments and copy work well to shift your budget toward high-profit ads while reducing ad spend on those that don’t work. 

So your PPC agency must provide accurate and transparent reporting, so you always know where every dollar goes and the ROI it produces. 

Furthermore, top PPC agencies aim to collect as much information as possible regarding everything about your campaign. 

This insight helps them to adapt and produce higher ROI campaigns with first-party data directly from your business. 

You may not be able to find out much about this from an agency’s website. So it’s important to ask questions regarding the data and metrics they measure to influence their suggestions and future campaign strategies. 

3. Intent-driven keyword selection

The top PPC marketers know the best way to improve ROIs and reduce wasted ad spend is by focusing on transactional keywords rather than informational keywords for paid search marketing. 

Why? Because people searching for transactional terms are more likely to spend money. 

And good PPC strategists know this is the best way to get your business in front of the right people at the right time without wasting ad spend on irrelevant terms that aren’t going to turn into purchases. 

You may have a hard time learning about this from their website. So be sure to ask questions and gauge their knowledge around intent-based search queries before moving forward. 

4. First-party data sources and strategic partnerships

Search engines and social media platforms are continually updating their algorithms to be as human as possible to provide the best experience for their users. 

So the best PPC companies to partner with are on top of these continuous changes. 

Search and social partnerships provide those deep insights and industry trends non-partners don’t have. 

Furthermore, agencies with a pool of first-party data sources have a first-hand look at your audience’s attributes and behavior to make strategic decisions regarding your campaign before using your ad spend to test the market. 

Look for partnership badges for major search engines and social media platforms on their website. You can also look for an indication of first-party data sources. 

5. Mobile optimization

Fifteen years ago, mobile browsing and searching weren’t around. But today, mobile devices account for more than 50% of all searches made around the world.

But there’s something else a bit more interesting. Mobile devices account for 53% of paid clicks, which means there’s a huge opportunity (and need) to optimize your paid search strategy for mobile.

On top of that, there are nearly 3.5 million mobile social media users across the globe. So the opportunity for mobile-optimized paid social media campaigns is massive as well.

This makes an excellent case for mobile PPC campaigns. And the best PPC companies know this. So make sure the company you choose is prepared to strategize and optimize your campaigns for mobile devices. 

You may have to ask questions if you can’t find this information on their website. 

And if you’re not confident in their mobile capabilities, move on to a different PPC agency. 

6. Local PPC capabilities

90% of shoppers turn to search engines when looking for information on local businesses, and 33% perform these types of searches every day.

Pair that with the fact that 40% of total clicks go to the top three ad spots for transactional keywords, and you have a strong argument for local paid search marketing. 

So if your business operates in specific areas or you have a physical location to sell products or meet with potential customers, local paid search experience and capabilities are must-haves. 

Some PPC agencies specialize in local PPC, but that doesn’t mean those that don’t can’t produce impressive results. 

So be sure to ask questions to ensure you’re a good fit for each other. 

7. Multi-channel PPC services

If you’re looking for a specific type of PPC marketing, this isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker. 

But if you’re interested in cross-channel marketing, it’s easier to run all your campaigns through a single agency. 

And the more you work with them, the more in-tune they become with your business, industry, and specific campaign goals. Plus, you have the benefit of communicating and coordinating with one agency rather than managing several at the same time. 

Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about misaligned messaging from one platform to the next. 

So carefully consider where your target audience hangs out. Don’t forget to consider search engines, social media, paid shopping, and programmatic advertising on sites they frequently visit. 

Then, choose a PPC agency experienced in those areas.

What to expect from a great PPC company

If you’ve never worked with a PPC company before, it’s hard to know what to expect. So now that you know what to look for let’s talk about what working with one of the best PPC companies looks like. 

The details of each phase look different depending on the company you’re working with, but the general approach is typically the same. 

Phase 1: Discovery

The best PPC companies do everything they can to learn everything there is to know about your business and what you’re looking for. So, the first step to any new PPC project is discovery and onboarding. 

During this phase, you and your agency should hash out:

Your budget (including monthly ad spend)

The goals for your PPC campaign

What makes your business different from your competitors

How to improve your landing pages to increase conversions

Specific details about your business and target audience like where they hang out online, when they tend to shop, and where they live

What happens next

This is your chance to share everything you can possibly think of with your PPC agency. Even if it doesn’t feel relevant, it may be crucial to your success. So come into this phase as an open book with an open mind. 

Phase 2: Planning and testing

Once the agency understands your business, target audience, and marketing goals, it’s time to plan your upcoming campaign. This includes defining critical metrics and KPIs as well. 

This phase may also include running a small, low-budget pilot campaign to test different audience segments, copy, and overall execution. 

So, the more information you know about your target audience, the easier this will be. 

By the end of this stage, you’ll have a plan in place for full-scale execution and a deeper understanding of how you’re going to work together moving forward. 

Phase 3: Full-scale execution

Now it’s time to launch the full campaign. The specifics of this depend on the type of advertising and the agency you’re working with. 

Your project could be short-term, long-term, or ongoing. But during this time, you should get regular feedback and thorough reporting outlining everything about your campaign. 

And when your campaign comes to a close, you should have a clear picture of your results. 

Phase 4: Next steps

Lastly, your agency will walk you through the data they collected and explain what everything means. They’ll also probably provide suggestions and feedback on what they can improve if you want to continue working together. 

This stage should also cover what happens next. 

Strategy + creative + the right audience segments = high ROI

Hiring a top PPC company is a smart choice if you’re looking to save time, strategize with experts in your industry, and enjoy short-term results (when compared to something like SEO). 

But choosing a PPC agency you can trust is harder than it sounds. 

So whether you’re looking for advice or someone to take over and manage your campaigns, use these tips and recommendations when making your decision. 

Do you have any experience vetting and hiring a PPC agency? What criteria did you consider when making your decision?

The post The 5 Best PPC Companies of 2020 appeared first on Neil Patel.

The 5 Best PPC Companies of 2020 Publicado primeiro em https://neilpatel.com

[remelitalia]

The 5 Best PPC Companies of 2020

Paid advertising offers a 200% ROI. So for every dollar you spend, you get two dollars in return. It’s no surprise that nearly 80% of marketers consider PPC profitable and beneficial for their businesses. 

But it’s not as easy as throwing ads up, seeing what sticks, and hoping people buy from you. 

There’s a reason PPC agencies exist — managing countless moving parts, and continuous algorithm updates take time. Plus… none of those things are easy to stay on top of, either. 

To make matters worse, choosing the best PPC company for your business presents a new set of challenges. So in this article, I cover my top recommendations, characteristics to look for, and what to expect working with an agency. 

Let’s get started!

The 5 top PPC companies in the world

PPC is an exciting type of digital marketing because you can quickly and directly evaluate your investment return. 

But whether you’re an excellent PPC manager looking to outsource or have no experience running pay per click advertising campaigns, choosing the right PPC agency isn’t always straightforward.

So to help you out, I put together this list of my top recommendations for different types of businesses. 

Let’s dive in!

1. Neil Patel Digital — Best data-driven multi-channel PPC agency

Ads in search engine results aren’t the only type of PPC advertising. 

Other examples include social media, programmatic, and Amazon, each with their own set of quirks and best practices. 

At Neil Patel Digital, we specialize in running multi-channel PPC campaigns using first-party data from our partners. Furthermore, we take this information and use it to create strategic, high-profit campaigns that meet your audience where they are. 

All while helping those in your audience make an informed decision to buy. 

We’ve helped companies like Intuit, GM, and Facebook make more money authentically, using our data-driven approach to digital marketing. 

2. Directive Consulting — Best for B2B, SaaS, and enterprise businesses

If you’re a B2B, SaaS, or enterprise business looking for consulting services or a dedicated PPC management partner, Directive Consulting is an excellent option. 

They specialize in helping software companies around the world run high-ROI campaigns with a dedicated team running and optimizing things behind the scenes. 

Directive Consulting says one of their key differentiators is the predictability of their results. 

They prove it by showcasing numerous case studies outlining their results. In one example, they facilitated a 91.1% increase in lead generation in the first three months on top of decreasing their client’s cost-per-lead by 21.8%. 

So you can rest assured that you’re in good hands.

3. Stryde — Best for B2C and eCommerce businesses

B2C pay per click campaigns are vastly different from B2B campaigns. With different markets and trends, it’s essential to understand your industry’s specific ins and outs. 

And who better to do that than an agency specializing in eCommerce? 

Stryde is an eCommerce-specific digital marketing agency working with small and large companies all over the world. 

While they focus on other aspects of digital marketing like SEO and email marketing, PPC is a huge part of what they do. 

They helped Lime Ricke, a swimwear brand, achieve a 5.2x ROI. Furthermore, they helped  Lucy Ave, a women’s clothing company, obtain a 4.3 ROI. 

With repeatable and impressive results like these (and others outlined in their extensive portfolio), you know you’re making a smart choice.

4. Loud Mouth Media — Best small agency producing big results

If you’re looking for an expert partner in search advertising or paid social, Loud Mouth Media has your back. They’re a small agency based in the UK specializing in PPC (specifically paid search and social) campaigns for businesses of all sizes. 

Loud Mouth Media is partnered with Google, Bing, and Facebook as well. So you know they’re always up-to-date with the latest trends and research across those platforms. 

They’re a small team of 23 expert marketers, creatives, and strategists producing impressive results for companies of all sizes around the world. 

And with numerous digital marketing awards under their belt and past clients like Volvo and BBC, their credentials and portfolio make them stand out as the best small PPC agency producing massive results.

5. KlientBoost — Best for PPC management + landing page design

Strong PPC campaigns go beyond excellent ad copy, design, and targeting. Where you send your targeted traffic matters.  

Which… is why it’s crucial to have well-designed landing pages optimized to convert visitors into leads or customers. At KlientBoost, they understand the importance of conversion-focused landing pages. 

Their in-house team of developers, conversion designers, and top-notch marketers gives them the power to design excellent customer experiences from start to finish. 

They’ve produced repeatable results like:

300% conversion rate increase for Juniper Networks

315% increase in click-through rates for Lemon Stand

97% decrease in cost-per-acquisition for Caresync

So, if you’re looking for a bit of help optimizing your landing pages and a dedicated PPC advertising team to target the right people and turn them into buyers, KlientBoost is for you. 

7 characteristics that make a great PPC company

Now you know my top PPC recommendations based on what you need. 

Let’s move on to what makes these PPC companies the best at what they do. We’ll also walk through what to look for on your hunt for the best option for your business. 

1. Extensive industry knowledge

The best PPC campaigns focus on the right audiences and the right keywords. But not all audience segments or keywords are equal. 

Understanding what works and what doesn’t comes from experience and in-depth industry knowledge. Without the two of those, you’re banking on intuition. 

Which… works sometimes, but that’s not what you should expect from a top PPC agency. 

Take a look at who’s a part of the agency’s team and take some time to evaluate their experience level and expertise in your specific industry. 

You can also look at their published case studies in different industries to see the types of results they produce for their clients. 

If you’re not confident in their knowledge in your industry, move on to an agency that feels like a better fit. 

2. Advanced analytics and reporting

Analytics and reporting are essential aspects of any PPC campaign. 

They help you get a better understanding of what segments and copy work well to shift your budget toward high-profit ads while reducing ad spend on those that don’t work. 

So your PPC agency must provide accurate and transparent reporting, so you always know where every dollar goes and the ROI it produces. 

Furthermore, top PPC agencies aim to collect as much information as possible regarding everything about your campaign. 

This insight helps them to adapt and produce higher ROI campaigns with first-party data directly from your business. 

You may not be able to find out much about this from an agency’s website. So it’s important to ask questions regarding the data and metrics they measure to influence their suggestions and future campaign strategies. 

3. Intent-driven keyword selection

The top PPC marketers know the best way to improve ROIs and reduce wasted ad spend is by focusing on transactional keywords rather than informational keywords for paid search marketing. 

Why? Because people searching for transactional terms are more likely to spend money. 

And good PPC strategists know this is the best way to get your business in front of the right people at the right time without wasting ad spend on irrelevant terms that aren’t going to turn into purchases. 

You may have a hard time learning about this from their website. So be sure to ask questions and gauge their knowledge around intent-based search queries before moving forward. 

4. First-party data sources and strategic partnerships

Search engines and social media platforms are continually updating their algorithms to be as human as possible to provide the best experience for their users. 

So the best PPC companies to partner with are on top of these continuous changes. 

Search and social partnerships provide those deep insights and industry trends non-partners don’t have. 

Furthermore, agencies with a pool of first-party data sources have a first-hand look at your audience’s attributes and behavior to make strategic decisions regarding your campaign before using your ad spend to test the market. 

Look for partnership badges for major search engines and social media platforms on their website. You can also look for an indication of first-party data sources. 

5. Mobile optimization

Fifteen years ago, mobile browsing and searching weren’t around. But today, mobile devices account for more than 50% of all searches made around the world.

But there’s something else a bit more interesting. Mobile devices account for 53% of paid clicks, which means there’s a huge opportunity (and need) to optimize your paid search strategy for mobile.

On top of that, there are nearly 3.5 million mobile social media users across the globe. So the opportunity for mobile-optimized paid social media campaigns is massive as well.

This makes an excellent case for mobile PPC campaigns. And the best PPC companies know this. So make sure the company you choose is prepared to strategize and optimize your campaigns for mobile devices. 

You may have to ask questions if you can’t find this information on their website. 

And if you’re not confident in their mobile capabilities, move on to a different PPC agency. 

6. Local PPC capabilities

90% of shoppers turn to search engines when looking for information on local businesses, and 33% perform these types of searches every day.

Pair that with the fact that 40% of total clicks go to the top three ad spots for transactional keywords, and you have a strong argument for local paid search marketing. 

So if your business operates in specific areas or you have a physical location to sell products or meet with potential customers, local paid search experience and capabilities are must-haves. 

Some PPC agencies specialize in local PPC, but that doesn’t mean those that don’t can’t produce impressive results. 

So be sure to ask questions to ensure you’re a good fit for each other. 

7. Multi-channel PPC services

If you’re looking for a specific type of PPC marketing, this isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker. 

But if you’re interested in cross-channel marketing, it’s easier to run all your campaigns through a single agency. 

And the more you work with them, the more in-tune they become with your business, industry, and specific campaign goals. Plus, you have the benefit of communicating and coordinating with one agency rather than managing several at the same time. 

Furthermore, you don’t have to worry about misaligned messaging from one platform to the next. 

So carefully consider where your target audience hangs out. Don’t forget to consider search engines, social media, paid shopping, and programmatic advertising on sites they frequently visit. 

Then, choose a PPC agency experienced in those areas.

What to expect from a great PPC company

If you’ve never worked with a PPC company before, it’s hard to know what to expect. So now that you know what to look for let’s talk about what working with one of the best PPC companies looks like. 

The details of each phase look different depending on the company you’re working with, but the general approach is typically the same. 

Phase 1: Discovery

The best PPC companies do everything they can to learn everything there is to know about your business and what you’re looking for. So, the first step to any new PPC project is discovery and onboarding. 

During this phase, you and your agency should hash out:

Your budget (including monthly ad spend)

The goals for your PPC campaign

What makes your business different from your competitors

How to improve your landing pages to increase conversions

Specific details about your business and target audience like where they hang out online, when they tend to shop, and where they live

What happens next

This is your chance to share everything you can possibly think of with your PPC agency. Even if it doesn’t feel relevant, it may be crucial to your success. So come into this phase as an open book with an open mind. 

Phase 2: Planning and testing

Once the agency understands your business, target audience, and marketing goals, it’s time to plan your upcoming campaign. This includes defining critical metrics and KPIs as well. 

This phase may also include running a small, low-budget pilot campaign to test different audience segments, copy, and overall execution. 

So, the more information you know about your target audience, the easier this will be. 

By the end of this stage, you’ll have a plan in place for full-scale execution and a deeper understanding of how you’re going to work together moving forward. 

Phase 3: Full-scale execution

Now it’s time to launch the full campaign. The specifics of this depend on the type of advertising and the agency you’re working with. 

Your project could be short-term, long-term, or ongoing. But during this time, you should get regular feedback and thorough reporting outlining everything about your campaign. 

And when your campaign comes to a close, you should have a clear picture of your results. 

Phase 4: Next steps

Lastly, your agency will walk you through the data they collected and explain what everything means. They’ll also probably provide suggestions and feedback on what they can improve if you want to continue working together. 

This stage should also cover what happens next. 

Strategy + creative + the right audience segments = high ROI

Hiring a top PPC company is a smart choice if you’re looking to save time, strategize with experts in your industry, and enjoy short-term results (when compared to something like SEO). 

But choosing a PPC agency you can trust is harder than it sounds. 

So whether you’re looking for advice or someone to take over and manage your campaigns, use these tips and recommendations when making your decision. 

Do you have any experience vetting and hiring a PPC agency? What criteria did you consider when making your decision?

The post The 5 Best PPC Companies of 2020 appeared first on Neil Patel.

Original content source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/ppc-companies/ via https://neilpatel.com

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[rairii]

Daelos Campaign: Alternate Employment

After a few hours of resting, Tom and the interviewer harelequin came to the full recovery room.

As soon as he spotted the interviewer, Damerion edged in his seat towards his father, keeping his eyes on her instead of on Tom, who cleared his throat.

"Greetings everyone. We’re going to take a three day break after the festivities in this location! Do not worry - we are staying mobile, but so long as you are within a 15 minute run from our supplies we won’t be leaving you behind! We’ll be performing in the next area, thought not the next scheduled event.”

He turned, peering through the crowd of people, until he found what he was looking for. “There you are!” and he waved a hand, gesturing the party over as he sat at a table. “Please gather around, please please.” Lily barely waited until she had reached him before asking, “Do we get paid?”

“Don’t worry, as long as you are doing things you of course still get paid. Now, this is more concerning your unique situation, as it is.”

“Unique situation?” Clara sat down carefully, settling her bulk between two chairs that creaked ominously. The others began to take their places around them as the crowd behind murmured and a few began leaving to tell others the news.

“Yes, see I wasn’t expecting more than a few months of casual help, so and so, but there have been a few interesting developments.”

“Yes we’ve noticed. Do you need our help with something?” Clara looked at him with an earnest expression of helpfulness.

“Well, well,” began Tom, “It has come to my attention, with a few of my old friends - they’re really old, its nice to be the young one for once amongst them, even if only for a few weeks.”

Tarron dealt a hand of cards to Damerion, settling in for a long tangent. “Although once you reach 80 you don’t think of yourself as young-” a card was flipped, “but considering some of these friends, it makes sense that-” flip, “they’d consider me a young one”, Damerion put a card on the table, “but really, some of them are calling me a young shrimp-” flip, “Oh, I’m sorry I’m getting off topic aren’t I?”

“You do whatever you do, anyway“ interjected Saika, who had pulled out another cigarette and was in the process of lighting it.

“I know that is possible that not all of you would want to continue in this venture, as we strive to perform where we can, and with the increased threat of war coming on, there is an increase in danger...”

“Are we getting a raise then” interjected Damerion, who looked up from his cards with mild interest.

“That is a great question we can decide on once we’ve gone through all the options! For instance, you might not want to continue with this line of work with the increased threat. There is is also the prospect that war entices you, in which case I have some friends who would be most interested in hearing from you.” Damerion’s eyes were slowly glazing over. One look to the side showed that Tarron’s had already glazed over as he looked at his cards. “Or I might be misreading you and you are simple adventurers, in which case there are some other matters that are bothering us in the more classic adventuring type”

“Technically I hunt adventurers, and am not on one” commented Saika from his corner of the table.

“Well, there is always something for new experiences! Good on you for keeping an open mind and open heart!” Tom beamed at Saika, as if he was a teacher puffing out in pride at a student who had just volunteered for a task.

Tarron looked up from his cards. “Are you going to get to the point anytime soon or will I have to deal a second hand?”

“Alright, let’s uh“ and Tom looked at a piece of paper “Skim notes. Do you want to continue working with us? Do you want to continue your separate ways and explore the world? Or do you want to take one of the opportunities we have that involves war and adventuring, or do you want something I have no idea bout and involves this person!” and he dramatically waved towards the interviewer.

Damerion winced.

“So if we take option C, I assume our paygrade goes up as well as the risks” Saika was looking at intently.

“Possibly. It’s open for negotiation”

“Right so you don’t want to pay us more. Got it” and Saika looked back around the party, before leaning forwards. “I’m not the only one in this, but I’m ok with a little more risk.”

“I would like to know what it entails before signing up for more risk.” drawled Tarron, eyes still fixated on his cards. That was when the interviewer stepped forward.

"With recent events coming to rise, others are using it as a distraction to achieve their goals. There is someone that my group wishes to have killed, that we cannot interfere with personally.”

“Why do they have to be killed?” asked Clara, but Tarron interrupted before the harelequin could respond.

"You realize that sort of request requires a lot more information, even if we were interested, which for the record, I’m not.” Damerion nodded absent-mindedly as he took a card from the pile.

The interviewer looked at Tarron, considering,  “This assignment has some information that would be useful for you concerning your wife.”

Damerion dropped his hand of cards.

Tarron: “Are you - is this information you have, or information they have?” “They need to be -” and Tarron cut through, speaking more harshly. “Is this information you have, or information they have.”

“We know that she was working with them concerning runes.”

“So technically its what they have”, Saika commented, keeping his eyes trained on the interviewer.

“Why does this person have to be killed" repeated Clara patiently.

“We believe they are  trying to work on reviving some of the runes from the rune wars, and that cannot be allowed.”

Silence enveloped the party as they considered it. The rune wars had decimated nations, had shaped the land. There was a reason there were rune knights hunting down those who would bring the runes back.

"I’m happy to help” began Clara, looking around the group. "I don’t need a raise, if there are people who would bring hurt back I will stop them.”

Saika huffed at her. “I’m all for bleeding hearts and everything, but at the end of the day, I gotta earn money, so uh, what’s your price.”

“You can take my part!

"I’m not going to take your share, that’s your share!”

Clara smiled at Saika. “I don’t need it.”

"You need it for - oh never mind.” and he subsided in time for the interviewer to speak again.

“1000 gold each, a 250 gold each bonus if you can obtain all their research.“

While the two had been discussing, Tarron had slipped a piece of paper to Damerion, written in cypher.

"Thoughts?" said the paper.

"I am curious... We haven't had a lead in a while"

"True. But we can get the information without necessarily signing on."

"Not if they take the research and refuse to deal with us"

"I meant more with these people" and Tarron jerked his head.

"If we tell Saika what to look for he might be a good source"

"Maybe. I don't like signing on to something with the explicit purpose of killing someone."

"Me neither. We should get more information"

Saika was speaking. “I’m down but I know I can’t do it on my own. I’ll take it if you guys do too”

Clara jumped in with a “I’m in too”.

Tarron looked up from the notes he’d been exchanging with his son. “Still considering”.

Tom gestured at them expansively. “Well part of the reason I wanted you to rest before this information is so that you may think on it clearly and then can sleep on it and decide! Like I said, things are really, what’s the word for it, things have really gone to shit, and now a lot of people are willing to pay to have people to sort it out!”

Saika just looked over to Tarron and Damerion. “You know I am a detective. If you need some help in looking into something - you said your wife? - I can help out. I’m already getting paid, so I won’t ask for more money from you. It’s a practical solution.”

"Let us ... we’ll get back to you.” said Tarron.

The Interviewer just nodded and reached into a bag, and tossed over a trinket at the table. Both Saika and Tarron reached out for it, but Saika caught it, and turning to look at it, found a rabbit’s foot that looked like it had been ripped off its leg, still bleeding and splotching the ruffled fur.

“Oh god... Clara you want this thing?”

Clara took it as the interviewer spoke again. “If you wish to contact us, use that.”

“Do we squeeze it, do we shake it, do we suck it like a dick what do we do” Saika asked roughly as she put it away. The interviewer merely stared at them, told them “you use it”, and then left.

Tom sighed in relief a bit. “Um, she actually intimidates me. Either way, I’m going to leave a wide variety of options at your table and you can consider this a favour repaid and I’m going to take care of some important paperwork. You feel free to get some nice well deserved rest.”

Before Tom had finished talking, Tarron had already gotten up, Damerion after him, following the harelequin, who once outside, paused and turned around, silent and expectant, almost as if she had said “yes?”.

“You are asking us to ask for something for the explicit goal of murdering someone. I’d like to have more information. You should know from my interview that this is not something I’m ok with, and I don’t appreciate information being held hostage over it“

They seem a bit confused. “It’s simple. They’re trying to recover runes from the rune wars.”

“I would like to know how you know this“

She stared at him, almost as if unbelieving his questioning. “We’re the harelequins. if something needs to be killed we know about it“

“Vague and unhelpful. I’m looking for real answers here” challenged Tarron.

“It is all slightly private, unless you want to share all the cyphers to your maps” There was silence, before Damerion piped up “Excuse me, um, first off, are you sure it isn’t innocent investigation for knowledge’s sake.”

She shook her head. “No. We know from receipts that most likely your mother was helping translate, but didn’t know what they were translating. It is believed they are most definitely trying to revive some ancient rune practices“

Tarron challenged her again: “Who, who is?”

“We do not have the exact details. We are hoping that you will help us find some.”

Damerion considered this carefully. “Would you accept a modified deal, where we get more information for you, instead of possibly killing someone.”

They shrugged. “If they end up dead within your contracts parameters, it doesn’t matter how it happens, you’ll get paid.”

“Who are you to decide that” asked Tarron.

She stared at Tarron again, as he remembered the rumours surrounding harelequins.  Despite the official force charged with matters pertaining to the rune wards, the harelequins were rumoured to be routinely hired due to their information network, to find a person, and kill them. 

“So why can’t you deal with it yourself. You go through all the show and bluster...”

"We tried. We’re trying a new approach. Besides, personal investment tends to get better results as well.”

She looked between Tarron and Damerion, before asking “Anything else or may I move on”

Tarron stepped forwards, grim. “What guarantees do we have... you have your suspicions about my wife. But what if she is curious. What if you decide that she doesn’t deserve to live. What assurance do I have that she is not a another name to be struck off on your list.”

She stared at Tarron, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “Because if people revive the runes from the rune wars, we’ll have a much bigger issue to deal with than the war between orcs and gnomes.”

“That’s not the assurance I’m looking for”

She waved him away. “That’s all I’m allowed to give”

“If you have additional information and want us to deal with this, why don’t you give it to us, give us the full story of what you fully know so we can make a more informed decision. You’re holding shit back on us, and that is not a good way to entice someone into a deal. By your own admission you are holding things back.”

She sighed, and rubbed her temples.

“We’re offering because you are unrelated to other things, you’ll have a personal interest, and because the situation was supposed to be deal with at an earlier time, but when we did, your wife was one of the many that was hired, and when we sent an operative to deal with this, someone else intervened and almost everyone ended up dead. We are sending you over too, because you want answers, and we want answers, and you can find the answers for us while we try to deal with the new situations that have arisen, and if you aren’t interested in that, than you can let one of your best leads that you know of to find your wife drive by. You aren’t needed, you are an extra expense. Is that all?“

“Yes. Thank you for perhaps the first honest statement you’ve made”

They turned, mutter to themselves, and left.

Damerion twisted his hands, and turned to his father. “I think we should be involved, at the least.”

“I don’t like it”

“We don’t have to fulfill the contract. It will mean, not getting the money, but it means, possibly getting the information”

“You’re probably right”

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/politics/ap-fact-check-trumps-untruths-on-russia-probe-wall-jobs/

AP FACT CHECK: Trump's untruths on Russia probe, wall, jobs

President Donald Trump is glossing over the facts when it comes to the Russia investigation and his economic performance.

The president suggests the 34 charges issued or guilty pleas achieved by special counsel Robert Mueller have had little to do with him. But Trump’s ignoring reality. Most significantly, his former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, has implicated Trump in a crime by linking him to a hush-money scheme. Cohen also pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his efforts during the 2016 campaign to line up a Trump Tower Moscow project, saying he did so to align with Trump’s “political messaging.”

On the economy, Trump claimed record low unemployment for blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans even as the numbers have risen after the partial government shutdown. And he described the steel industry as “totally revived” despite 20,000 job losses over the past decade.

A look at his past week’s claims, also covering global warming and purported progress in building a border wall:

RUSSIA INVESTIGATION

TRUMP: “Of the 34 people, many of them were bloggers from Moscow or they were people that had nothing to do with me, had nothing to do with what they’re talking about or there were people that got caught telling a fib or telling a lie. I think it’s a terrible thing that’s happened to this country, because this investigation is a witch hunt.” — interview with CBS, broadcast Sunday.

THE FACTS: Trump’s correct that Mueller’s team has indicted or gotten guilty pleas from 34 people. He’s wrong to suggest that none had anything to do with him or were simply “bloggers from Moscow.” Among these people are six Trump associates and 25 Russians accused of interfering in the 2016 election.

In particular, Cohen definitely was in trouble for what he did for Trump. Cohen pleaded guilty in August to several criminal charges and stated that Trump directed him to arrange payments of hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal to fend off damage to Trump’s White House bid. Prosecutors’ court filings in December backed up Cohen’s claims.

The Justice Department says the hush money payments were unreported campaign contributions meant to influence the outcome of the election. That assertion makes the payments subject to campaign finance laws, which restrict how much people can donate to a campaign and bar corporations from making direct contributions.

It is true that many of Trump’s former associates, including Cohen, were charged with either lying to the FBI or Congress.

The 25 Russians charged were not simply “bloggers.”

According to Mueller’s indictment last February, 13 Russians and three Russian entities are accused of attempting to help Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton by running a hidden social media trolling campaign and seeking to mobilize Trump supporters at rallies while posing as American political activists. The indictment says the surreptitious campaign was organized by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm financed by companies controlled by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a wealthy businessman with ties to President Vladimir Putin.

Mueller’s team also charged 12 Russian military intelligence officers in July with hacking into the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic Party and releasing tens of thousands of private communications. The charges say the Russian defendants, using a persona known as Guccifer 2.0, in August 2016 contacted a person in touch with the Trump campaign to offer help. And they say that on the same day that Trump, in a speech, urged Russia to find Clinton’s missing emails, Russian hackers tried for the first time to break into email accounts used by her personal office.

———

TRUMP: “You look at General Flynn where the FBI said he wasn’t lying, but Robert Mueller said he was, and they took a man and destroyed his life.” — interview with CBS.

THE FACTS: That’s not what the FBI said. And Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, has agreed that he lied to the FBI, having pleaded guilty to it.

The idea that Flynn didn’t lie to the FBI picked up steam after Republicans on the House intelligence committee issued a report last year. It said ex-FBI director James Comey, in a private briefing, told lawmakers that agents who interviewed Flynn “discerned no physical indications of deception” and saw “nothing that indicated to them that he knew he was lying to them.” But Comey called that description “garble” in a private interview with House lawmakers in December.

Comey, in essence, said Flynn was a good liar, having a “natural conversation” with agents, “answered fully their questions, didn’t avoid. That notwithstanding, they concluded he was lying.”

At his sentencing hearing in December, Flynn acknowledged to Judge Emmet Sullivan that he knew it was a crime when he lied to the FBI in January 2017. Flynn declined to accept the judge’s offer to withdraw his guilty plea. Neither he nor his lawyers disputed that he had lied to agents.

———

UNEMPLOYMENT

TRUMP: “You saw the jobs report just came out. …The African-Americans have the best employment numbers in the history of our country. Hispanic Americans have the best employment numbers in the history of our country. Asian-Americans the best in the history of our country.” — CBS interview.

THE FACTS: Black unemployment is not currently the lowest ever, possibly in part to the partial government shutdown, which lifted joblessness last month.

Black unemployment did reach a low, 5.9 percent, in May. But that figure is volatile on a monthly basis. That rate has since increased to 6.8 percent in January.

Hispanic and Asian-American joblessness has also risen off record lows last year. Hispanic unemployment last month was 4.9 percent, up from a low of 4.4 percent reached in October and December. Asian-American unemployment was at 3.1 percent, up from 2.2 percent in May.

Moreover, there are multiple signs that the racial wealth gap is now worsening. The most dramatic drop in black unemployment came under President Barack Obama, when it fell from a recession high of 16.8 percent in March 2010 to 7.8 percent in January 2017.

———

THE WALL

TRUMP: “The chant now should be ‘finish the wall’ as opposed to ‘Build the Wall’ because we’re building a lot of wall. I started this six months ago — we really started going to town — because I could see we were going nowhere with the Democrats.” — comments Friday.

TRUMP: “Large sections of WALL have already been built with much more either under construction or ready to go. Renovation of existing WALLS is also a very big part of the plan to finally, after many decades, properly Secure Our Border. The Wall is getting done one way or the other!” — tweet Thursday.

THE FACTS: Despite all his talk of progress, he’s added no extra miles of barrier to the border to date. Construction is to start this month on a levee wall system in the Rio Grande Valley that will add 14 miles of barrier, the first lengthening in his presidency. That will be paid for as part of $1.4 billion approved by Congress last year.

Most work under contracts awarded by the Trump administration has been for replacement of existing barrier.

When Trump says large parts of the wall “have already been built,” he’s not acknowledging that previous administrations built those sections. Barriers currently extend for 654 miles (1,052 kilometers), or about one-third of the border. That construction was mostly done from 2006 to 2009.

———

STEEL INDUSTRY

TRUMP: “Tariffs on the ‘dumping’ of Steel in the United States have totally revived our Steel Industry. New and expanded plants are happening all over the U.S. We have not only saved this important industry, but created many jobs. Also, billions paid to our treasury. A BIG WIN FOR U.S.” — tweet Jan. 28.

THE FACTS: He’s exaggerating the recovery of the steel industry, particularly when it comes to jobs.

In December, the steel industry employed 141,600 people, the Labor Department says in its latest data. Last March, when Trump said he would impose the tariffs, it was 139,400. That’s a gain of just 2,200 jobs during a period when the overall economy added nearly 2 million jobs. On a percentage basis, steel industry jobs grew 1.6 percent, barely higher than the 1.3 percent increase in all jobs.

Yet those figures still lag behind where they were before the 2008-2009 recession. When that downturn began, there were nearly 162,000 steelworkers.

Some companies have said they will add or expand plants. It’s difficult to know just how many jobs will be added by newly planned mills. But construction spending on factories has yet to take off significantly after having been in decline between 2016 and much of 2018. Construction spending on factories has been flat in the past year, according to the Census Bureau.

Trump’s reference to “billions paid to our treasury” concerns money raised from tariffs on foreign steel and other products. Such tariffs are generally paid by U.S. importers, not foreign countries or companies, and the costs are often passed on to consumers. So that money going to the government is mostly coming from Americans.

———

VOTER FRAUD

TRUMP: “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote. These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped. Strong voter ID!” — tweet Jan. 27.

THE FACTS: That “iceberg” quickly began to melt as officials found serious problems with a report from the Texas secretary of state’s office on voter fraud. More broadly, Trump is overstating the magnitude of such fraud across the U.S.

The Texas report suggested as many as 95,000 non-U.S. citizens may be on the state’s voter rolls and as many as 58,000 may have cast a ballot at least once since 1996. Since it came out, however, state elections officials have been notifying county election chiefs of problems with the findings. Local officials told The Associated Press that they received calls from Texas Secretary of State David Whitley’s office indicating that some citizens had been wrongly included in the original data.

So far no one on the lists has been confirmed as a noncitizen voter. Election officials in Texas’ largest county say about 18,000 voters in the Houston area were wrongfully flagged as potentially ineligible to vote and those officials expect more such mistakes to be found on their list.

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Trump ally, acknowledged problems in the report, saying “many of these individuals may have been naturalized before registering and voting, which makes their conduct perfectly legal.”

Early claims by other states of possible illegal voting on a rampant scale haven’t held up.

When Florida began searching for noncitizens in 2012, for instance, state officials initially found 180,000 people suspected of being ineligible to vote when comparing databases of registered voters and driver’s licenses. Florida officials later assembled a purge list of more than 2,600 names but that, too, was beset by inaccuracies. Eventually, a revised list of 198 names of possible noncitizens was produced through the use of a federal database.

In the U.S. overall, the actual number of fraud cases has been very small, and the type that voter IDs are designed to prevent — voter impersonation at the ballot box — is almost nonexistent. In court cases that have invalidated some ID laws as having discriminatory effects, election officials could barely cite a case in which a person was charged with in-person voting fraud.

———

JUDGES

TRUMP: “After all that I have done for the Military, our great Veterans, Judges (99), Justices (2) … does anybody really think I won’t build the WALL?” — tweet Jan. 27.

THE FACTS: He’s boasting here about his record of getting federal judges and justices on the bench. But that record is not extraordinary. He also misstates the total number of judges who have been confirmed by the Senate — it’s 85, not 99.

While Trump did successfully nominate two justices to the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, during his first two years in office, four other modern presidents did the same — Democrats Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, and Republican Richard Nixon. Trump, meanwhile, is surpassed in the number of confirmed justices by Warren Harding (four), William Taft (five), Abraham Lincoln (three) and George Washington (six), according to Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and expert on judicial appointments.

Trump’s 85 total judicial appointees lag behind five former presidents at comparable points in office.

The five are George W. Bush, 99; Clinton, 128; Ronald Reagan, 88; Nixon, 91; and Kennedy, 111, according to Wheeler’s analysis.

———

CLIMATE CHANGE

TRUMP: “In the beautiful Midwest, wind chill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you!” — tweet Jan. 28.

THE FACTS: Global warming does not need to make a comeback because it hasn’t gone away. Extreme cold spells in parts of the globe do not signal a retreat.

Earth is considerably warmer than it was 30 years ago and especially 100 years ago. The lower 48 states make up only 1.6 percent of the globe, so what’s happening there at any particular time is not a yardstick of the planet’s climate. Even so, despite the brutal cold in the Midwest and East, five Western states are warmer than normal.

“This is simply an extreme weather event and not representative of global scale temperature trends,” said Northern Illinois University climate scientist Victor Gensini. “The exact opposite is happening in Australia,” which has been broiling with triple-digit heat that is setting records.

Trump’s own administration released a scientific report last year saying that while human-caused climate change will reduce cold weather deaths “in 49 large cities in the United States, changes in extreme hot and extreme cold temperatures are projected to result in more than 9,000 additional premature deaths per year” by the end of this century if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at recent rates.

Trump routinely conflates weather and climate. Weather is like mood, which is fleeting. Climate is like personality, which is long term.

———

Associated Press writers Christopher Rugaber, Jill Colvin, Colleen Long and Seth Borenstein in Washington, Elliot Spagat in San Diego and Paul J. Weber in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.

———

Find AP Fact Checks at http://apne.ws/2kbx8bd

Follow @APFactCheck on Twitter: https://twitter.com/APFactCheck

EDITOR’S NOTE _ A look at the veracity of claims by political figures

[andrewuttaro]

New Look Sabres: Amerks Angle - January Edition

The American Hockey League, for how closely associated it is with the NHL and that league’s global reach, feels somewhat claustrophobic at times. I keep a close eye on my hometown Americans of Rochester and it seems like they’ve played all of Utica, Syracuse and Toronto a hundred times by now. Last season when I was watching the Amerks even more than the Sabres because well… you know… there was this nonstop competition within the North Division. This is not unlike the NHL where you also play your divisional opponents most frequently but in the AHL it seems like your division is all that matters. If you’re in the top four of your division you’re in the playoffs and just like in the NHL anything can happen there. Why am I contemplating the nature of the American league season? Before we last got together for Amerks Angle there was a losing streak and fears the Amerks would not be able to maintain their lead atop the North Division. They briefly did fall out of that spot in December but now find themselves there again maintaining that status by any points in the standings they can get: wins, shootout wins and shootout losses have all come into play in the last ten games since we last looked at the Amerks Angle. This tight race isn’t exciting just because last year’s North Division dominator won a Calder Cup Title but because it makes every little move and machination within the team that much more important. There may have been only ten games since we last got together and focused on the Americans but oh so much has happened in the organization to make this Amerks team fascinating as we prepare to head down the stretch run of the season.

For one, up until the recent trade we’re about to talk about, there has been a long jam in terms of roster spots throughout the organization meaning waivers, call-ups and send-downs have needed to be an exact science. That trade we’re about to talk about: Justin Bailey. If you aren’t regular follower of Sabres prospects or the Rochester Americans let me tell you one thing: Bailey was beloved. He was a local boy living his childhood dream of playing for the Buffalo Sabres organization. He signed sticks, sent encouraging messages to children and the whole shebang that you would want any socially responsible athlete to accomplish. He was loved in Rochester more than perhaps anyone who has been moved out in the last two to three years but his dream was becoming a nightmare. When he was drafted in 2013 he was lauded as one of the more skilled future Sabres of that draft and was at the top of the depth chart. He got his NHL chances but for the following six seasons he largely played in Rochester, never being able to crack a consistent spot with the big club. Whether it was mishandling him by the prior General Manager’s regime or his own failure of consistency there seemed to be some writing on the wall after he was sent to the Amerks following Training Camp. When fellow snake-bitten 2013 Draft prospect Nic Baptise was also traded out of town earlier this season it left him as the last domino to fall and last Thursday he was traded to the Philadelphia Flyers organization for Taylor Leier. It’s the end of an era in terms of Tim Murray draft picks who never panned out (glances over at Alex Nylander expectantly) but it’s also the emotional kind of move that when you see the player in another team’s jersey it just feels weird.

Perhaps even more interesting for the Amerks has been call-ups: CJ Smith was probably the most deserving call-up in recent memory and did not disappoint; in Buffalo or when he got back down to Rochester for that matter. It’s hard to not be excited for an undrafted free agent who has developed so well he’s been an AHL All-Star two seasons in a row and anchored center depth in Rochester for just as long. Smith flew under the radar during a training camp we were all obsessing over the hot new toys like Lawrence Pilut and Rasmus Dahlin. He’s more consistent and coachable than Alex Nylander and Rasmus Asplund combined and he’s from Iowa so you know he’s strong and full of corn! We all were busy drooling over Victor Olofsson so much coming out of training camp that we forgot to think about the way more finely tuned machine that is Conor James Smith. He got that narrow heart-stopper of a first NHL goal this month before getting sent back down to only score a game-winning hat trick! Smith is going to be a solid bottom six center on the Sabres soon. Olofsson may see time in Buffalo down the stretch according to prognosticators smarter than me but Smith should frequent Dinosaur BBQ now because this ought to be his last spring in Rochester. I surely hope it ends in a Calder Cup, it would be great to have a few champions on the Sabres for their 50th Anniversary 2019-2020 campaign (hopefully in royal blue)! But lo, this is Amerks Angle, not Prospect watch. I don’t write these to look at the Americans from a strictly Buffalo Sabres angle. This is the angle of the Amerks and I was born and raised in that beautiful city down the thruway! Let’s talk about beautiful silver-colored history: the Calder Cup!

Not only has the sports scene in Rochester hit a bumper-shattering speed bump the last couple years so it could very much use a title, this team can achieve a deep playoff run this postseason on their own merits! Certainly there is a lot of hockey to be played, a little under half a season to be slightly more precise, but unlike the Sabres you can count on the Amerks clinching a playoff spot this April. Last Postseason went over like a deflated balloon for a couple reasons: Linus Ullmark was recovering from concussion symptoms and the entire offense had a bit of brain crunch against Syracuse, all puns intended. The subtractions from that team scarcely removed any meaningful talent except Ullmark who is being competently replaced in Rochester by Adam Wilcox and a Scott Wedgewood who is an NHL starters in 10/31 organizations. The additions only make this team better. I already talked about Olofsson and Smith but Zach Redmond is a dark horse candidate for AHL MVP 2019; that’s not to mention the handful of AHL mercenaries, Danny O’Regan, Jack Dougherty, Yannick Veilleux and others; that Jason Botterill and Randy Sexton added to this team like a couple of mad geniuses just itching for a trophy they can drink out of. Unlike last season’s team this season’s Amerks have consistently held onto the division lead excluding a brief stretch during this regular season and no matchup within the North Division has this roster shaking in their boots… or skates… whatever. They certainly got to lock down the remaining divisional games this season, which is most of the remaining games, but I am confident they can do that at around least a 75% rate. Hell, considering the first half of the season they’ll probably sweep the out-of-division games and split the divisional ones 50%. Even then they hold onto the division lead and get a favorable matchup to start their hunt for the Cup of Calder. I think they can do it, or at least I see few reasons they can’t.

The Rochester Americans have a New Look all their own and I can’t wait to see them carry it into a post-season in which I can drive to most of the likely first and second round opponents! The fun is just beginning for this Americans team and as we endure what will either be a brutal or exuberant next 11-20 games with the Buffalo Sabres, Rochester will always provide solace. That’s Rochester: a City of good community and kick ass soccer and hockey. I would say I miss it but I was home five times the last seven weeks so I’ve had my fill for now. Speaking of having your fill, did you enjoy this blog post? Leave a comment: What are you doing during the Buffalo Sabres bye-week? Drop a like and share this blog, if Amerks Angle is what gets a lot of traffic you bet there can be more of this than just monthly; especially once those playoffs get here. Both the Sabres and Amerks have a couple players going to their respective league All-Star weekends later this week so the hockey fast ought to be over soon.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. If you’re looking for more Rochester Americans blogging then Let’s Go Amerks is well worth your time. That blog is just about NHL SB Nation blog quality and all about the Amerks! Check it out.

[earlyninja]

RE: Some thoughts (and advice) for EarlyNinja

Here is our message regarding the points highlighted by Mike Bithell (http://mikebithell.tumblr.com/post/156352150437/some-thoughts-and-advice-for-earlyninja). At this point, we believe that the last thing we can do to end this witch hunt is to be blunt and give the clearest answers possible.

You’re overestimating your service’s value to a dev. 15%. Really? You advertise this as half of competitor platforms. Let’s put aside that these platforms provide clients and hardware (your roadmap lists Q4 2017 as a hopeful date for a client, which seems optimistic, and will presumably not be as feature rich as GOG or Steam at launch). On a purely marketing level, do you honestly think you can bring a game on your service even 1% of the eyeballs of such a competitor?

Steam is not a competitor. Perhaps this wasn’t clear in the Kickstater campaign page. Developers will have both (or even more) streams of revenue, as we do not impose exclusivity. Do you really think that we’re arrogant enough to come up and stand against a giant like Steam? Steam is not our competitor, it is instead a driving force to strive for better. In this light, us charging 15% for the service is not an overestimation. Why would a developer discard an additional stream of revenue (with higher overall income) when they can also prove to the gaming community that they can abide to their own milestones? There is no need for us to mention developers that have not followed their own milestones... and it’s the consumer who pay that price. 

I know, the sensei are where your value lies this is where, and I don’t wish to be rude, I worry that your team is unfamiliar with the existing games business. You’re describing someone who looks after a project and gives feedback to the team on how things are going externally. So a publisher side producer meets community manager. There’s a number of issues with that. First, experience. If I work with a publisher, I expect my producer to have experience and wisdom, having shipped a number of products. That’s an expensive person for you to hire (spoilers, you might get two for a year on this kickstarter amount, if you pay them very badly). Second, That producer is not someone I pay for, they are the publisher’s insurance on their investment in my game, and part of their running costs. Selling a producer to a game company as added value is like charging me for the plate in a restaurant: I accept that at least part of my bill goes towards crockery maintenance, but I sort of expect a plate regardless of if its being used as a selling point. 

Senseis are not figures that replace a publisher. They have never been that. They are consultants that report information, mediate the conversation between EarlyNinja and the dev and provide project management consultancy when needed. Their formation is not covered in the Kickstarter and will not be until (if) successful funding, but rest assured that Senseis will be individuals highly proficient in project management and communication (there are people that actually hire people of this sort, we include this in our “absurd” 15%). 

You’re using copyrighted materials and other people’s stuff to promote yourselves without permission you have grabbed a bunch of art from games you don’t own, and are using it in an attempt to get paid. I’d think you were being nefarious and picking on defenseless indies if I didn’t see Ubisoft IP on your mockups. That shows a lack of understanding on your part. No amount of caveats and small print about voting is going to make that legally or creatively ok. Stop it. I’ve seen devs tweeting you requests to stop using their stuff, your business will require good, trusting relationships with devs, this isn’t a good start.

We already released a blog post on this and we have nothing else to state in this regard. The only thing we can say is that all we wanted to do was to gather feedback from gamers, that’s it.

Ditto on youtubers you’re citing some pretty big names there… did you get permission? It’s considered a little rude to even use review quotes to sell a game without an OK first, but here you’re grabbing soundbites from two or three years back which on the surface look like endorsements. Youtubers are going to be a big part of your business, hell, they’re a big part of all our businesses now. Using their likenesses / avatars and logos without permission might not be a great idea.

We reported the quotes from YouTubers because they served as insipration for EarlyNinja's model. As above, we never wanted to hint that they endorse our model, rather the fact that early access is broken. 

Holding milestone payments is one of those ideas that makes a lot of sense to a fan of games who’s never made one, and I suspect is the idea this was built around. Except it doesn’t achieve the outcomes you state. Crucially, milestone payments are front loaded, because in real game dev, the most important thing in the world (besides making something awesome) is steady cash flow. Even a month with no cash coming in can kill a team *gestures to every story about a studio shut down ever*.

Here is a passage from our internal documentation:

If a developer misses the delivery of a milestone that is equal to the double of the time set for the delivery of the same or if a developer does not meet two milestones (from the previous one, taking into account time shift requests), then players will be eligible for a refund.

The communication between developer and platform (Sensei): Our Sensei will periodically try to communicate with the developers to monitor their progress with the development. If developers are unavailable to communicate and do not reach back to the Sensei in a brief period of time (we are not talking about days…but not months either), then the Sensei can choose to put the game into “Zombie” 

Games in Zombie Mode will be refundable and will be highlighted in the store for the inactivity of their developers.  The refundable state is not reversible. The refundable state is therefore not automatically triggered and users can choose to keep the game in their library even it is in refundable state.

We did not think this level of detail was necessary in the Kickstarter page (which is long enough as it is), but apparently it is. This is not ransom. This is a system build to protect the consumer in case something goes wrong with the development, and we all know that gamers were scammed by early access developers. Sorry if a few messed up the whole. This simply prevents it and the same time allows a hard-working developer to stand out from the clutter of the market (can you do this in greenlight without any marketing activity?).

The point is that an individual developing a game is also an entrepreneur. It is true that EarlyNinja’s team does not have specific background in game development, but we can boast great successes in digital and media marketing (and a very vast knowledge as gamers). For this reason, we believe one of the reasons why EA has its issues is because there is great coding knowledge but limited resources and time. And this is where management skills can come in hand.

Milestones work pre-release and in private because there is room for both parties to work together, adjusting plans, so that a game actually comes out the other end. Publishers don’t generally use milestones as ransoms, because it’s in their best interest to get a game out at the budget planned for. Your system doesn’t encourage that, you are genuinely asking a studio to hand you the power to shut down their production immediately.

We are no publishers, but we aim to work closely to developers to ensure that their product has the maximum potential at launch. How do we do this? Through the Sensei.

Have you spoken to a lawyer about the contracts? No really, this is a big one. Your milestones are going to have to be maddeningly specific if you want to cut a project off from their cash, or you’re going to have to make the contract favor you so much as to be genuinely predatory. Assuming good faith and a genuine desire to treat devs well, you’re going to have to put together some massive contracts, and each dev is going to have to get quite a bit of legal aid to parse and commit to what you’re asking for. That’s going to cost them. Good news for industry lawyers though ;) … also consider the complexity of international deals.

All of our documentation is perfectly fine from the legal standpoint and we have dev contracts ready to be signed if you are interested. EDIT: to be clear, we are referring to the contracts that we would be signed from developers in case they’d want to join EN.

Is your price going up once you have a client? So, it’s 15% right now, and I give you steam keys. A bad deal for me, but let’s say I do it.. I think you’re worth that cost. I give 15% to you. Once you have your own client, your value to me goes up, because now you’re providing all those awesome services. Willing to commit to keeping at that price point?

Steam key integration is work in progress and there’s nothing to speak about, as it does not even pertain to our current funding goal. The price charged from EN will never vary in this respect. 

None of this makes early access games better. Not even a little bit. Right now, shitty early access games are caught and mocked very, very quickly. They die on the vine because the PC community is a beautifully communicative lot. That’s good for consumers, because it’s genuinely tough to buy something without knowing it’s bad (and refunds can be sought if a game sucks.. a fact you kinda don’t mention anywhere). Projects fail or succeed quickly, and everyone moves on.

Yes, trash EA games are mocked and taken care of quite quickly, but that doesn’t mean gamers won’t be throwing their money in the toilet during their selling time. About the refund policy, EN’s refund policy is explained in the reply regarding milestones. The only way a user will ever get a full refund is when he requests it during the first 15 days from purchase. Out of curiosity... what are Steam’s refund policies?

I don’t think you’re bad people, you all look lovely in your team photo, but this idea seems riddled with misunderstandings about game production, and some ill thought out choices in terms of promotion. I’d encourage you to step back, readdress some of the core ideas that got you here, and relaunch with something badass that the development community and gamers can really get behind. Those of us who work hard to make great games (and occasionally succeed) will never shy away from a service that genuinely helps us to do so :)

Thank you for your kind words. We are looking for constructive feedback to help this project come to life. We believe in it and we’ve worked hard for it and we remain open to all suggestions. Feel free to reach out to us if you are interested in conversating with us. 

[thenickdefalco]

My Very Late  Halo 5 Review

I have been debating posting this for a very long time. I wrote it in November of 2015 for a friend who was going to publish it on his new gaming website, so now here we are over a year later, and it was never posted. so here it is, I hope to star posting reviews for other things like movies and games, so hopefully this will not be the last and only review...

Hunt the Truth that is what Microsoft and 343 industries have been asking us to do for the better part of six months. However as I put the last bullet into the last Forerunner enemy I sit and wonder, what Truth was I Hunting. While I completely understand that mass market advertising can be misleading, but in no way was I expecting what would play out in HALO 5. The plot of HALO 5 is a bit underwhelming, to say the least. Part of that has to do with the set up you were expecting after some of the more reveling advertisements that ended up on TV and across your social media. These ads would have led you to believe that the Master Chief and Spartan Locke are engaged in a great philosophical battle, between the Chief and his former command and Humanity in General. Yet this is most definitely not the case, instead you spend most of the time as Spartan Locke, about 80% of the campaign, and Master Chief the other 20%. The big showdown you expect never really happens; it all plays out over a few cut scenes, and some in game chatter. As the game progresses, it sometimes makes you wonder, am I missing something, did I skip a cut scene? But alas you are probably not the only person, a lot of the backstory seems to be missing, or even major plot points. HALO 5 expects you to have played and completed the first four HALO games, and to be heavily invested into the lore. While I understood most of what was going on, as I have fallen deep into the rabbit hole that is HALO cannon, I was still left questioning many things. There is also the question of character motivation and growth. It seems to be lacking both, as great as HALO 4 was; HALO 5 is seriously lagging behind. The world HALO 4 expanded on is almost completely missing; Captain Lasky is relegated to a tertiary background character, Dr. Halsey is magically a good guy again, Captain Palmer is just an afterthought, Roland the AI gets a longer exposure time, and even the Arbiter is in almost blink and you’ll miss him cameo, ok no not really, but you get the point. That’s not to say I didn’t like the campaign, I liked it very much. The Squad aspect is something new and injected a new spark into the already awesome HALO formula. The set pieces are some of the most beautiful landscape’s I have ever seen in a video game. The Enemies have never looked better, and the weapons are majestic. This is truly one of the best next gen games graphic wise that I have seen. The story is also not as convoluted as I may have made it seem either. There is a clear beginning middle and end; just how you get there is muddled. The squad based combat however is where the campaign truly shines, the interaction between the characters is great, and allows you to understand who your team is without having to read anything or visit a wiki page. This also allows you to last a little longer in the harder difficulties, as you can revive your time and they can revive you. It also allows more for a more vertical playing field, like no other HALO campaign has had before. It creates a new element that allows you to find new angles to defeat your enemies, as well as find hidden Skulls, a HALO Staple, and Intel. The new Spartan abilities also add to the fun, with the clamber ability and of course the new fan favorite SPARTAN Ground Pound, being able to take out horde of enemies in a single go, without a grenade is always fun. While no HALO has ever really had boss battles, the few fights with the Warden Eternal, a new Forerunner enemy, is a welcome break from the normal action. His fights require skill and tactics to beat him, and patience when fighting him on higher difficulties, especially on Legendary where you might have to muster some willpower to outlast him. I did welcome the return of the Arbiter, as it was nice to see that his fight was still going, however if you were one of the people that found and watched all the Terminals in HALO 2 anniversary, and beat HALO 2 anniversary on Legendary, then again you will find yourself wondering, what 343i was trying to achieve, as those cut scenes do not necessarily add up to what is going on in HALO 5. Spoiler Warning! The biggest change of pace that comes with HALO 5 is the return of Cortana. If you finished HALO 4 then you know Cortana was presumed dead, and lost forever. However in scenes similar to the first half of HALO 3 Cortana reaches out to the Chief seeking his help, and through what seems as random cuts of cut scenes in the Locke portions of the game, we find out the Cortana may not be the same. As it turns out, she has “cured” her rampancy, what happens when AI begin to lose competency, and has taken on the Mantle of Responsibility from the Forerunners. And as such that is why you are fighting the Warden Eternal, as he is tasked with protecting her. Thus Cortana is now the main antagonist of the game, and if you beat the game on Legendary you will see that HALO 5 is only a set up for future HALO games, such as the ending of HALO 2. Spoilers End. After playing the campaign I wondered about the whole Hunt the Truth, was this plan all along, did Microsoft and 343i just want to make you think? Obviously they knew what would happen, and possibly did not expect the backlash. Maybe, just maybe the whole point was to throw you off the main trail, and if you listened to the accompanying Hunt the Truth on Soundcloud it would make a while more sense that the whole point of the ad campaign was to throw you off. Now let’s get down to what really makes HALO the behemoth that it is, online multiplayer. HALO 5 has one of the best multiplayer experiences since HALO 2 redefined first person shooter multiplayer way back in 2004. After last year’s debacle with the Master Chief Collection 343i needed to make waves and deliver a solid multiplayer experience and they did more than that, they brought the house down. The maps are solid, as ever, and the Spartan abilities, like clamber, the ability to climb up on any ledge, makes for a more well-rounded experience. It has been a long while since I wanted to sink my teeth into a HALO, and this is the one I have been waiting for.  HALO 5Multiplayer has two modes, WARZONE and ARENA. ARENA has 6 ranked modes; one unraked, and has an additional ranked playlist that changes almost every weekend. The Ranked modes include Team Arena, SWAT, Slayer, Breakout, Free-for-All and Holiday Doubles, or Big-Team-Battle, depending on the season. You earn your rank after 10 matches of a single playlist and will be ranked bronze, silver, gold, platinum or diamond. If you are ranked ONYX or Champion Division that means you are individually ranked between 3000 and 1 overall, 300-201 for ONYX and 200-1 for Champion Division. Forge is also back in HALO 5 and is the best yet, every year Forge gets more fine-tuned and adds more depth and customization, making it easier and easier fr you to become a HALO level designer. Yet HALO 5s biggest best mode is the new WARZONE. It is a massive 12 on 12, along with enemy AI. It all plays out on four of the biggest maps ever made for a HALO game, and is arguably one of the best and most fun additions to the HALO universe.  The biggest change that comes to HALO Multiplayer and is a major component of WARZONE is the REQ system. According to the Halo Wiki, the REQ system is “The requisition system is a feature in Halo 5: Guardians Arena and Warzone multiplayer that grant players cosmetic and in-game bonuses. Requisitions (REQs) are unlocked by obtaining Requisition Packs, which can be earned through gameplay or purchased via the Xbox Store.” You earn Requisition points in every multiplayer match that you can use to buy one of three REQ packs, bronze, silver or gold. You also earn REQ packs by leveling up; finding them in various promotional items such as one of the HALO themed Xbox one controllers, different MEGA BLOCKS HALO sets, or you can earn them simply by leveling up and earning different commendations in HALO 5 multiplayer. There are two types of REQ cards that a player can earn as well, one time use, and unlimited use. Unlimited use REQ cards are mostly cosmetic and can be used in WARZONE and Arena. This includes Spartan Armor, Helmets, visor color, assassinations and weapon skins. While the one time use cards can only be used in WARZONE and still have to be unlocked via REQ level in WARZONE. So no play to win here, as everyone has is on “equal” footing at the start of every WARZONE match. WARZONE itself has two different modes to play, WARZONE and WARZONE Assault. WARZONE is one the most fun I have had in a long time. WARZONE pits two teams of 12 against each other, and the first team to 1000 points overall wins. Each game starts with your team trying to take back your base from AI invaders, being either Forerunner or Covenant. After you take back your base you are now free to roam the map, where three more bases are available to capture. Once your team captures two basses you are able to start manually racking up points. On top of capturing basses and killing enemy teams, various AI bosses will appear on the map, and the team that kills the boss gets a huge point boost, so if your team is lagging in the base capturing department set your sights on a regular of Legendary boss and just watch as the point gap virtually disappears. On average WARZONE games last about 20 minutes, unless your team is so good you can lock up the three bases and boss kills and finish the game in 10 or less.